Matthew Reilly - Ice Station

The way he figured it, the blast from the submarine's torpedo must have dislodged the ten meters or so of ice in from of the window, exposing it. The window and whatever it was attached to, had been buried deep within the iceberg.

Schofield took a deep breath. Then he kicked hard, shattering the window.

He saw darkness beyond the now-open window, a small cave of some sort.

He pulled a flashlight from his hip pocket and, with a final look up at Renshaw, swung himself in through the window and into the belly of the iceberg.

The first thing Schofield saw through the beam of his flashlight was the upside-down words:

HAPPY NEW YEAR 1969!

WELCOME TO LITTLE AMERICA IV!

The words were written on a banner of some sort. It hung limply:?upside down?across the cave in which Schofield now stood.

Only it wasn't a cave.

It was a room of some sort?a small wooden-walled room, completely buried within the ice.

And everything was upside down. The whole room was inverted.

It was a strange sensation, everything being upside-down. It took Schofield a second to realize that he was actually standing on the ceiling of the underground room.

He looked off to his right. There seemed to be several other rooms branching off from this one?

"Hello down there!" Renshaw's voice sailed in from outside.

Schofield poked his head out through the window in the ice cliff.

"Hey, what's happening? I'm freezing my nuts off out here," Renshaw said.

"Have you ever heard of Little America IV?" Schofield asked.

"Yeah," Renshaw said. "It was one of our research stations back in the sixties. Floated out to sea in '69 when the Ross Ice Shelf calved an iceberg nine thousand square kilometers big. The Navy looked for it for three months, but they never found it."

"Well, guess what," Schofield said. "We just did."

Cloaked in three thick woolen blankets, James Renshaw sat down on the floor of the main room of Little America IV. He rubbed his hands together vigorously, blew on them with his warm breath, while Schofield?still dressed in his waterlogged fatigues?rummaged through the other rooms of the darkened inverted station. Neither man dared to eat any of the thirty-year-old canned food that lay strewn about the floor.

"As I remember it, Little America IV was kind of like Wilkes," Renshaw said. "It was a resource exploration station, built into the coastal ice shelf. They were after offshore oil deposits buried in the continental shelf. They used to lower collectors all the way to the bottom to see if the soil down there contained?"

"Why is everything upside-down?" Schofield asked from the next room.

"That's easy. When this iceberg calved, it must have flipped over."

"The iceberg flipped over?"

"It's been known to happen," Renshaw said. "And if you think about it, it makes sense. An iceberg is top-heavy when it breaks off the mainland, because all the ice that's been living underwater has been slowly eroded over the years by the warmer seawater. So unless your iceberg is perfectly balanced when it breaks free from the mainland, the whole thing tips over."

In the next room, Schofield was negotiating his way through piles of rusty overturned junk. He stepped around a large, cylindrical cable spooler that lay awkwardly on its side. Then he saw something.

"How long did you say the Navy looked for this station?" Schofield asked.

"About three months."

"Was that a long time to look for a lost station?"

In the main room, Renshaw shrugged. "It was longer than usual. Why?"

Schofield came back in through the doorway. He was carrying some metal objects in his hands.

"I think our boys were doing some things down here that they weren't supposed to," Schofield said, smiling.

He held up a piece of white cord. It looked to Renshaw like string that had been covered over with white powder.

"Detonator cord," Schofield said as he tied the white powdery cord in a loop around his wrist. "It's used as a fuse for close-quarter explosives. That powdery stuff you see on it, that's magnesium-sulfide. Magnesium-based detonator cords burn hot and fast?in fact, they burn so hot that they can cut clean through metal. It's good stuff; we sometimes use it today.

"And see this." Schofield held up a rusted pressurized canister. "VX poison gas. And this"?he held up another tube? "sarin."

"Sarin gas?" Renshaw said. Even he knew what that was. Sarin gas was a chemical weapon. Renshaw recalled an incident in Japan in 1995 when a terrorist group had detonated a canister of sarin gas inside the Tokyo subway. Panic ensued. Several people were killed. "They had that stuff in the sixties?" he asked.

"Oh, yes."

"So you think this station was a chemical weapons facility?" Renshaw asked.

"I think so, yes."

"But why? Why test chemical weapons in Antarctica?"

"Two reasons," Schofield said. "One: Back home, we keep nearly all of our poison gas weapons in freezer storage, because most poison gases lose their toxicity at higher temperatures. So it makes sense to do your testing in a place that's cold all year round."

"And the second reason?"

"The second reason is a lot simpler," Schofield said, smiling at Renshaw. "Nobody's looking."

Schofield headed back into the next room. "In any case," he said as he disappeared behind the doorway, "none of that's really much use to us right now. But they do have something else back here that might be helpful. In fact, I think it might just get us back in the game."

"What is it?"

"This," Schofield said as he reappeared in the doorway and pulled a dusty scuba tank out into view.

Schofield set to work calibrating the thirty-year-old scuba gear. Renshaw was tasked with cleaning out the breathing apparatus?the mouthpieces, the valves, the air hoses.

The compressed air mix was the main risk. After thirty years of storage, there was a risk that it had gone toxic.

There was only one way to find out.

Schofield tested it?he took a deep inhalation and looked at Renshaw. When he didn't drop dead, he declared the air OK.

The two men worked on the scuba gear for about twenty minutes. Then, as they were nearing readiness, Renshaw said quietly, "Did you ever get to see Bernie Olson's body?"

Schofield looked over at Renshaw. The little scientist was bent over a pair of mouthpieces, washing them out with seawater.

"As a matter of fact, I did," Schofield said softly.

"What did you see?" Renshaw said, interested.

Schofield hesitated. "Mr. Olson had bitten his own tongue off."

"Hmmm."

"His jaw was also locked rigidly in place and his eyes were heavily inflamed?red-rimmed, bloodshot."

Renshaw nodded. "And what were you told happened to him?"

"Sarah Hensleigh told me you stabbed him in the neck with a hypodermic needle and injected liquid drain cleaner into his bloodstream."

Renshaw nodded sagely. "I see. Lieutenant, could you have a look at this please?" Renshaw pulled a waterlogged book from the breast pocket of his parka. It was the thick book that he had taken from his room when they had evacuated the station.

Renshaw handed it to Schofield. Biotoxicology and Toxin-Related Illnesses .

Renshaw said, "Lieutenant, when someone poisons you with drain cleaner, the poison stops your heart, just like that . There's no struggle. There's no fight. You just die. Chapter 2."

Schofield flipped the water-soaked pages to chapter 2. He saw the heading: "Toxin-Related Instantaneous Physiological Death."

He saw a list of what the author had called "Known Poisons." In the middle of the list, Schofield saw "industrial cleaning fluids, insecticides."

"The point is," Renshaw said, "there are no outward signs of death by such a poison. Your heart stops; your body just stops." Renshaw held up his finger. "But not so certain other toxins," he said. "Like, for instance, sea snake venom."