Matthew Reilly - Ice Station

YATES, JOHN F.

USAF

CPTN

P.S. SCARECROW, IF AND WHEN YOU GET BACK TO THE STATES, CALL A MAN NAMED PETER CAMERON AT THE WASHINGTON POST IN D.C. HE WILL KNOW WHERE TO FIND ME.

GOOD HUNTING, HAWK

Schofield stared at the e-mail for a moment, stunned.

"Hawk" was Andrew Trent's call sign.

Andrew Trent, who?Schofield had been told?had died in an "accident" during that operation in Peru in 1997.

Andrew Trent was alive ....

Renshaw printed off a copy of the e-mail and handed it to Schofield. Schofield scanned the e-mail again, thunderstruck.

Somehow, Trent had discovered that he was down in Antarctica. He had also discovered that a secondary team was on its way to Wilkes. Most disturbing of all, however, he had discovered that the United States Marine Corps had already listed Schofield as officially dead.

And so Trent had sent Schofield this e-mail, complete with a list of known ICG informers, in case Schofield had any traitors in his unit.

Schofield looked at the time of the e-mail. 7:32 p.m. It must have been transmitted via satellite during the 7:30 p.m. break in the solar flare.

Sctiofield scanned the list. A couple of names leaped out at him.

KAPLAN, SCOTT M. USMC GNNY SGT

Snake. As if Schofield needed to know that Snake was a traitor. And then:

KOZLOWSKI, CHARLES R. USMC SGT MJR

Oh, God , Schofield thought.

Chuck Kozlowski. The Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, the highest-ranking enlisted soldier in the Corps, was a member of the ICG.

And then Schofield saw another name that made him freeze in horror.

LEE, MORGAN T. USMC SGT

"Oh, no," Schofield said aloud.

"What?" Renshaw said. "What is it?"

Montana , Schofield thought. Montana's real name was Morgan Lee. Morgan T. Lee. Schofield looked up in horror. Montana was ICG.

Down in the hangar, Gant and the others were searching for information about the black plane.

In a small workshop, Santa Cruz was looking at some schematics. Sarah Hensleigh was sitting at a desk behind him, with a pencil and paper out.

"Nice name," Cruz said, breaking the silence.

"What?" Sarah said.

"The name of the plane. Says here that they called it the Silhouette ," Santa Cruz said. "Not bad."

Sarah nodded. "Hmmm."

"Any luck with that code?" he asked.

"I think I'm getting closer," Hensleigh said "The number that we were given, 24157817, seems to be a series of prime numbers: 2,41,5,7, until you get to 817. But 817 is divisible by 19 and 43, which are also prime numbers. But then, again, 817 could be two numbers, 81 and 7, or maybe even three numbers. That's the hard part, figuring out just how many numbers 24157817 is supposed to represent"

He smiled. "Better you than me, ma'am."

"Thanks."

At mat moment, Montana came into the workshop. "Dr. Hensleigh?" he said.

"Yes."

"Fox said to tell you that you might like to have a look at something she's found over in the office. She said it was a codebook or something."

"All right ." Hensleigh got up and left the workshop.

Montana and Santa Cruz were alone.

Santa Cruz resumed his examination of the ship's schematics.

He said, "You know, sir, this plane is something else. It's got a standard turbofan power plant with supercruise capability. And it's got eight small, retro jets on its underbelly for vertical takeoff and landing. But the strange thing is, both of these power plants run on regular jet fuel."

"So?" Montana said from the doorway.

"So ... what does the plutonium core do?" Santa Cruz said, turning to face him.

Before Montana could reply, Cruz turned back around to face his schematics. He pulled some handwritten notes out from under them.

"But I think I figured it out," he said. "I was telling Fox about this before. These notes I found say that the engineers at this hangar were working on some new kind of electronically generated stealth mechanism for the Silhouette, some kind of electromagnetic field that surrounded the plane. But to generate this electromagnetic field they needed a shitload of power, something in the neighborhood of 2.71 gigawatts. But the only thing capable of generating that kind of power is a controlled nuclear reaction. Hence, the plutonium." Santa Cruz nodded to himself, pleased.

He never noticed Montana stepping up quickly behind him.

"I tell ya," Santa Cruz went on, "this has been one seriously fucked-up mission. Spaceships, French troops, British troops, secret bases, plutonium cores, ICG traitors. Fuck. It's just?"

Montana's knife entered Santa Cruz's ear. It went in hard and penetrated Santa Cruz's brain in an instant.

The young private's eyes went wide; then he fell forward and slammed down face-first on the desk in front of him. Dead.

Montana extracted his bloody knife from Santa Cruz's skull and turned around?

?and saw Libby Gant standing in the doorway to the workshop, with a bundle of papers in her hands, staring at him in apoplectic horror.

Schofield keyed his helmet mike. "Gant! Gant! Come in!"

There was no reply.

Schofield glanced at his watch.

9:58 p.m.

Shit. The break in the solar flare would be here in two minutes.

"Gant, I don't know if you can hear me, but if you can, listen up. Montana is ICG ! I repeat, Montana is ICG ! Don't turn your back on him! Neutralize him if you have to. I repeat, neutralize him if you have to. I've gotta go."

And with that, Schofield raced upstairs and headed for the radio room.

Gant ran across the cavernous hangar with Montana in hot pursuit. She sprinted past an ice wall just as a line of bullet holes erupted across it.

Gant unslung her MP-5 as she raced through the bulkhead doorway that led back to the fissure and the main cavern. She fired wildly behind her. Then she dived into the horizontal fissure and rolled through it just as Montana appeared in the bulkhead doorway behind her and let off another burst of gunfire.

Another line of bullet holes raked across the ice wall around Gant, only this time the line of bullet holes cut across the middle of her body.

Two bullets lodged in her breastplate. One opened up a jagged red hole in her side.

Gant stifled a scream as she rolled through the fissure, clutching her side. She clenched her teeth, saw the trickle of blood seep between her fingers. The pain was excruciating.

As she rolled out of the fissure and into the main cavern, she saw the elephant seals over by the spaceship, and indeed, no sooner was she out of the fissure than she saw one of the seals lift its head and look over in her direction.

It was the male. The big bull with its fearsome lower fangs. It must have returned sometime in the last half hour, Gant thought

The male barked at her. Then it began to move its massive body toward her, his bulging layers of fat rippling with every lumbering stride.

The bullet wound in Gant's side burned.

She crawled on her backside away from the fissure, keeping one eye on the approaching elephant seal and the other on the fissure itself. A snail trail of her blood stained the frosty floor behind her, betraying her path.

Montana emerged from the horizontal fissure, gun first.

Gant was nowhere to be seen.

He saw the trail of blood on the floor, leading off to the right, around and behind a large boulder of ice.

Montana followed the trail of blood. He quickly came round the ice boulder and let rip with a burst of gunfire. He hit nothing. Gant wasn't there. Her MP-5 just lay there on the floor behind the ice boulder.

Montana spun.