Matthew Reilly - Ice Station

"Are you there yet?" Alison's voice said over the speaker phone. Alison was twenty-nine and had shoulder-length auburn hair, enormous sky blue eyes, and a beaming smile that made her face glow. Pete loved it. Alison wasn't conventionally beautiful, but she could stop traffic with that smile. At the moment, she was working out of the paper's D.C. office.

"I'm almost there," he replied.

He was on his way to an observatory out in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Some technician at the SETI Institute there had called the paper earlier that day claiming to have detected some chatter over an old spy satellite network. Cameron had been sent to investigate.

It was nothing new. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, or SETI, picked up stuff all the time. Their radio satellite array was very powerful and extraordinarily sensitive. It wasn't uncommon for a SETI technician, in his search for extraterrestrial transmissions, to "cross beams" with a stray spr satellite and pick up a few garbled words from a restricted military transmission.

Those pickups were disparagingly labeled "SETI sightings" by the reporters at the Washington Post . Usually they amounted to nothing?just incomprehensible one-word transmissions?but the theory was that maybe, one day, one of those garbled messages would provide the starting point for a story. The kind of story that ended in the word Pulitzer .

Alison said, "Well, call me as soon as you're done at the institute." She put on a mock-sexy voice. "I have a thing for SETI sightings."

Cameron smiled. "Very provocative. Do you do house calls?"

"You never know your luck in the big city."

"You know," Cameron said, "in some states, that could qualify as sexual harassment."

"Honey, being married to you is sexual harassment," Alison said.

Cameron laughed. "I'll call you when I'm done," he said before hanging up.

An hour later, Cameron's Toyota pulled into the dusty parking lot of the SETI Institute. There were three other cars parked in the lot.

A squat two-story office building stood adjacent to the parking lot, nestled in the shadow of a three-hundred-foot-tall radio telescope. Cameron counted twenty-seven other identical satellite dishes stretching away from him into the desert.

Inside, he was met by a geeky little man wearing a white lab coat and a plastic pocket protector. He said his name was Emmett Somerville and that it was he who had picked up the signal.

Somerville led Cameron down some stairs to a wide underground room. Cameron followed him silently as they negotiated their way through a maze of electronic radio equipment. Two massive Cray XMP supercomputers took up an entire wall of the enormous subterranean room.

Somerville spoke as he walked. "I picked it up at around two-thirty this morning. It was in English, so I knew it couldn't be alien."

"Good thinking," Cameron said, deadpan.

"But the accent was definitely American, and considering the content, I called the Pentagon right away." He turned to look at Cameron as he walked. "We have a direct number."

He said it with nerdy pride: The government thinks we're so important that they gave us a direct line . Cameron figured that the number Somerville had was probably the number for the Pentagon's PR desk, a number that SETI could have found by looking up the Department of Defense in the phone book. Cameron had it on his speed-dial.

"Anyway," Somerville said, "when they said that it wasn't one of their transmissions, I figured it was OK to give you guys at the paper a call."

"We appreciate it," Cameron said.

The two men arrived at a corner console. It consisted of two screens mounted above a keyboard. Next to the screens was a broadcast-quality reel-to-reel recording machine.

"Wanna hear it?" Somerville asked, his finger poised above the PLAY button on the reel-to-reel machine.

"Shoot."

Emmett Somerville hit the switch. The reels began to rotate.

At first Cameron heard nothing, then static. He looked expectantly at Emmett the Geek.

"It's coming," Somerville said.

There was a wash of some more static and then, suddenly, voices.

"? copy, one-three-four-six-two-five ? "

"? contact lost due to ionospheric disturbance ?"

" -?forward team ?"

"? Scarecrow ? "

"? minus sixty-six point five ? "

"? solar flare disrupting radio ?"

"? one-fifteen, twenty minutes, twelve seconds east ?"

"? how ," static, " get there so ?"

"? secondary team en route ?"

Pete Cameron slowly shut his eyes. It was another bum steer. Just more indecipherable military gobbledygook.

The transmission ended and he turned and saw that Somerville was watching him eagerly. Clearly, the SETI technician wanted something to come of his discovery. He was a nobody. Worse, a nobody out in the middle of nowhere. A guy who probably just wanted to see his name in the Washington Post in anything other than an obituary. Cameron felt sorry for him. He sighed.

"Could you play it again for me," he said, reluctantly pulling out his notepad.

Somerville practically leaped for the REWIND button.

The tape played again and Cameron dutifully took notes.

It was ironic, Schofield thought, that Petard, the last French commando, should be killed by one of his own weapons. Especially when it was a weapon that France had obtained from the United States by virtue of their alliance under NATO.

The M18A1 mine is better known throughout the world as the "Claymore." It is made up of a concave porcelain plate that contains hundreds of ball bearings embedded in a six-hundred-gram wad of C-4 plastic explosive. In effect, a Claymore is a directable fragmentation grenade?its lethality is dependent not on the force of its relatively small initial blast, but rather on the devastating fan-shaped spray of shrapnel that it emits. If one sits behind a Claymore, one will not be harmed by its shrapnel blast. If one is caught in front of it, one will be shredded to pieces.

The most well-known characteristic of the Claymore, however, is the simple instruction label that one finds embossed on the forward face of the mine. It reads: THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY.

Or, in French, BRAQUEZ CE CÔTÉ SUR L'ENEMMI.

If you ever found yourself looking at those words, you knew you were looking at the wrong end of a Claymore.

The two Claymores in the drilling room had been central to the French commandos' last-ditch plan to beat the Marines. After it was all over, Schofield pieced together that plan:

They had sent someone down to the drilling room, ahead of the others. Once there, that person had set up the two Claymores so that they faced the door. The Claymores would then be connected to a trip wire.

Then, the other French commandos would pretend to retreat to the drilling room, deliberately allowing the Marines to follow them.

Of course, the Marines would know that the drilling room was a dead end, so they would think that the French, in their desperate attempt to flee, had run themselves into a corner, into a trap.

Surrender would be inevitable.

But as the Marines entered the drilling room to secure the French troops, they would break the trip wire and set off the two Claymores. The Marines would be cut to ribbons.

It was an audacious plan. A plan that would have changed the course of the battle.

And it was cunning, too. It turned a full-scale retreat? hell, a total surrender ?into a decisive counterattack.

But what Petard and the French had not accounted for was that one of the American soldiers might come upon their trap while they were setting it.