Matthew Reilly - Ice Station

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.