Matthew Reilly: Ice Station

Schofield said, "Is he still alive?"

"Yes. You can't hear him now, which means he's probably asleep. But when he's awake, believe me, you'll know it."

"Uh-huh." Schofield examined the edges of the door, saw the rivets holding it to the frame. "Your friend did a good job with the door." He turned around. "If he's locked inside. That's good enough for me, if you're sure there's no other way out of that room."

"This is the only entrance."

"Yeah, but is there any other way out of the room? Could he dig his way out, say, through the walls, or the ceiling?"

"The ceilings and the floors are steel-lined, so he can't dig through them. And his room's at the end of the corridor, so there aren't any rooms on either side of it?the walls are solid ice," Sarah Hensleigh gave Schofield a crooked smile. "I don't think there's any way out of there."

"Then we leave him in there," Schofield said as he started walking back down the ice tunnel. "We've got other things to worry about. The first of which is finding out what happened to your divers down in that cave."

The sun shone brightly over Washington, D.C. The Capitol practically glowed white against the magnificent blue sky.

In a lavish red-carpeted corner of the Capitol Building, the meeting broke for recess. Folders were closed. Chairs were pushed back. Some of the delegates took off their reading glasses and rubbed their eyes. As soon as the recess was called, small clusters of aides immediately rushed forward to their bosses' sides with cellular phones, folders, and faxes.

"What are they up to?" the U.S. Permanent Representative, George Holmes, said to his aide as he watched the entire French delegation?all twelve of them?leave the negotiating room. "That's the fourth time they've called a recess today."

Holmes watched France's Chef de Mission?a pompous, snobbish man named Pierre Dufresne?leave the room at the head of his group. He shook his head in wonder.

George Holmes was a diplomat, had been all his life. He was fifty-five, short, and, though he hated to admit it, a little overweight.

Holmes had a round, moonlike face and a horseshoe of graying hair, and he wore thick horn-rimmed glasses that made his brown eyes appear larger than they really were.

He stood up and stretched his legs, looked around at the enormous meeting room. A huge circular table stood in the center of the room, with sixteen comfortable leather chairs placed at equal distances around its circumference.

The occasion, the reaffirmation of an alliance.

International alliances are not exactly the friendly affairs the TV news makes them out to be. When Presidents and Prime Ministers emerge from the White House and shake hands for the cameras in front of their interlocking flags, they belie the deal making, the promise breaking, the nit-picking, and the catfighting that go on in rooms not unlike the one in which George Holmes now stood. The smiles and the handshakes are merely the icing on very complex, negotiated cakes that are made by professional diplomats like Holmes.

International alliances are not about friendship. They are about advantage . If friendship brings advantage, then friendship is desirable. If friendship does not bring advantage, then perhaps merely civil relations may be all that is necessary. International friendship ?in terms of foreign aid, military allegiance, and trade alignment?can be a very expensive business. It is not entered into lightly.

Which was the reason why George Holmes was in Washington on this bright summer's day. He was a negotiator. More than that, he was a negotiator skilled in the niceties and subtleties of diplomatic exchange.

And he would need all his skills in this diplomatic exchange, for this was no ordinary reaffirmation of an alliance.

This was a reaffirmation of what was arguably the most important alliance of the twentieth century.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

NATO.

"Phil, did you know that for the last forty years, the one and only goal of French foreign policy has been to destroy the United States' hegemony over the Western world?" Holmes mused as he waited for the French delegation to return to the meeting room.

His aide, a twenty-five-year-old Harvard Law grad named Phillip Munro, hesitated before he answered. He wasn't sure if it was a rhetorical question. Holmes swiveled on his chair and stared at Munro through his thick glasses.

"Ah, no, sir, I didn't," Munro said.

Holmes nodded thoughtfully. "They think of us as brutes, unsophisticated fools. Beer-swilling rednecks who through some accident of history somehow got our hands on the most powerful weapons in the world and, from that, became its leader. The French resent that. Hell, they're not even a full NATO member anymore, because they think it perpetuates U.S. influence over Europe."

Holmes snuffed a laugh. He remembered when, in 1966, France withdrew from NATO's integrated military command because it did not want French nuclear weapons to be placed under NATO?and therefore U.S.?control. At the time the French President, Charles de Gaulle, had said point-blank that NATO was "an American organization." Now France simply maintained a seat on NATO's North Atlantic Council to keep an eye on things.

Munro said, "I know a few people who would agree with them. Academics, economists. People who would say that that's exactly what NATO is designed to do. Perpetuate our influence over Europe."

Holmes smiled. Munro was good value. College-educated and an ardent liberal, he was one of those let's-have-a-philosophical-debate-over-coffee types. The kind who argue for a better world when they have absolutely no experience in it. Holmes didn't mind that. In fact, he found Munro refreshing. "But what do you say, Phil?" he asked.

Munro was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, "NATO makes European countries economically and technologically dependent upon the United States for defense. Even highly developed countries like France and England know that if they want the best weapons systems, they have to come to us. And that leaves them with two options?come knocking on our door with their hats in their hands or join NATO. And so far as I know, the United States hasn't sold any Patriot missile systems to non-NATO countries. So, yes, I think that NATO does perpetuate our influence over Europe."

"Not a bad analysis, Phil. But let me tell you something; it goes a lot further than that, a lot further," he said. "So much so, in fact, that the White House maintains that the national security of the United States depends upon that influence. We want to keep our influence over Europe, Phil, economically and especially technologically. France, on the other hand, would like us to lose that influence. And for the last ten years successive French governments have been actively pursuing a policy of eroding U.S. influence in Europe."

"Example?" Munro said.

"Did you know that it was France who was the driving force behind the establishment of the European Union?"

"Well, no. I thought it was?"

"Did you know that it was France who was the driving force behind the establishment of a European Defense Charter?"

A pause.

"No," Munro said.

"Did you know that it is France who subsidizes the European Space Agency so that the ESA can charge vastly cheaper prices for taking commercial satellites up into orbit than NASA can?"

"No, I didn't know that."

"Son, for the last ten years, France has been trying to unite Europe like never before and sell it to the rest of the world. They call it regional pride. We call it an attempt to tell European nations that they don't need America anymore."

" Does Europe need America anymore?" Munro asked quickly. A loaded question.