The 6th Extinction (22 page)

The snow machine jolted hard and rolled, throwing them all clear.

Gray tumbled across the ice, losing his weapon, hugging his limbs in tight. He finally came to a stop. The Ski-Doo took another few bounces, then came to a rest. The other two men rose from the ice.

Kowalski patted himself, as if confirming he was still alive. “Didn’t exactly stick that landing.”

Barstow joined them, cradling one arm, his face bloody. He glanced over to the broken bulk of the Ski-Doo. “As they say, any landing you can walk away from . . .”

“They were talking about airplanes,” Kowalski admonished, “not friggin’ snowmobiles.”

The pilot shrugged his good shoulder. “We were
flying
there for a bit. So it still counts.”

Gray ignored them and searched the skies. He watched a small cluster of lights fall out of the darkness, disappearing beyond the edge of the cliff as the broken-off corner of the Brunt Shelf slid into the sea. He wasn’t positive he’d damaged the Twin Otter enough to make it crash or if the plane was merely limping away. Either way, the enemy could have radioed for additional support.

Gray didn’t want to stick around to find out.

He turned to the Ski-Doo.

Barstow must have read his expression. “Sorry, mate, she’s tits up. Looks like we’ll be walking from here.”

Gray pulled up the hood of his parka, already cold.

Kowalski voiced the question foremost in his own mind. “Where the hell do we go from here?”

4:18
P
.
M
.

“It’s gone . . . all gone.”

Jason heard the despair in the station commander’s voice—or rather
former
station commander. He and Karen stood atop a hillock of ice. It was tall enough for them to see beyond the patches of cold fog all the way to the coast. The shattered section of the shelf’s edge remained misty, but there was no mistaking a feature missing from that distant landscape.

The Halley VI Research Station was gone.

Those earlier blasts still filled Jason’s head. While fleeing aboard one of the Ski-Doos, he had watched that coastline shatter away amid flashes of fire and concussive blasts. The shock wave of those detonations had traveled through the ice to his position a kilometer away. It had taken another few agonizing minutes to find a high enough vantage to get a good look at the outcome.

Now they knew.

. . . all gone
.

Karen took a deep breath, shaking off her initial shock. “We should keep going,” she warned, eyeing the thick polar fog.

The temperature seemed to be dropping tens of degrees every minute.

Or maybe it’s hypothermia already settling in
, Jason thought.

Thirty yards off, their lone Sno-Cat idled among the cluster of snowmobiles. They had rescued a dozen members of the station, but how long could they stay out here? Caught unprepared, most were poorly dressed for these frigid temperatures, and the group of snow machines would only get them so far on their single tanks of gas. Even the heater on the Sno-Cat wasn’t working. It was why the vehicle had not been in use at the time of the attack.

“We need to find shelter,” Karen said. “But we’re still hundreds of miles from any base or camp. Our best chance is to stay here, hope someone heard those explosions and comes looking. But it could take days.”

“How long can we last out here on our own?”

She snorted. “We’ll be lucky to make it through the night. Sunrise is still another eighteen hours off. And the coming day will be only two hours long.”

Jason considered their options. “If anyone does come looking for us, they’ll have a hard time spotting us in the dark.”

“Maybe we could devise some signal. Siphon some of the petrol from one of the vehicles and ignite it if we hear a plane.”

Jason recognized one clear problem with this plan. “What if it’s not
rescuers
that come looking for us first?”

Karen hugged her arms around herself. “You’re right,” she mumbled. “Then what do we do?”

“I think I know where we can go.”

Karen lifted both eyebrows, but before she could question him, a squawk rose from her coat. She visibly startled at the sudden noise. She tugged down her parka’s zipper and removed a portable radio, one of the set she had distributed before exiting the station.

“
. . . hear us? Does anyone copy?
”

“That’s Gray!” Jason said, struggling past the impossibility of it.

Karen passed Jason the radio.

He pressed the button. “Commander Pierce?”

“
Jason, where are you? Are you safe?
”

He did his best to explain his situation, while getting a brief description from Gray about his escape from that calving berg of ice. But Gray’s team still remained stranded out there, and like Jason, he feared the enemy might return soon.

“I can take a couple of Ski-Doos and go fetch them,” Karen offered.

He nodded.

She faced him, her expression doubtful. “But, Jason, do you truly know somewhere we can find shelter?”

He stared out across the dark, featureless ice.

I hope so
.

5:22
P
.
M
.

Gray shivered inside his jacket and hunched farther over the handlebars of his Ski-Doo. He had a thick wool scarf frozen over the lower half of his face. His gloved fingers felt molded onto the grips by the cold.

He squinted against the wind, his aching eyes fixed to the glow of the Ski-Doo’s headlamp as it tunneled weakly through the swirling fog. He kept his gaze locked onto the snow machine in front of him, driven by Karen Von Der Bruegge. The station commander had arrived an hour ago, dragging a second empty Ski-Doo behind hers. She now carried the injured Barstow on her vehicle, while Kowalski huddled behind Gray.

Gray had to trust that Karen knew where she was going. She seemed to be following the treaded tracks of the group led by Jason. The kid had taken the others deeper into the fog-patched expanse of the Brunt Ice Shelf, retreating from the Weddell Sea—hopefully far enough away that the enemy couldn’t find them.

If we’re lucky, maybe they’ll believe we were all killed
.

The Ski-Doo in front suddenly slowed. Distracted in thought, Gray came close to rear-ending the other, but he braked in time to avoid a collision. After another ten yards, the reason for that sudden deceleration appeared out of the gloom.

A massive shadowy silhouette filled the world ahead of them. It looked like a flat-topped mountain rising from the icy plain. As they approached closer, details emerged: the towering skis, the bulk of the blue module, and the lone John Deere tractor.

It was a detached section of the destroyed station.

Earlier, Jason had noted this module being towed into the fog just before the assault broke out. He had hoped that the enemy, focused on the bulk of the Halley VI Research Station, might not have spotted its departure.

Looks like the kid was right
.

Though dark, the module looked unmolested. He spotted a Sno-Cat and a scatter of snow machines parked nearby. Karen drove her vehicle up and stopped alongside them. Gray trundled his Ski-Doo next to hers.

A hatch in the rear of the high module opened, and Jason stepped onto the small back deck. He waved them forward to the ladder that led up to him. Gray needed no such encouragement. The steamy breath of warm air from that open hatch was invitation enough.

The group hurried toward the shelter and its promise of heat. The temperature had dropped to thirty below zero, and with the katabatics kicking up more fiercely as the night deepened, the wind chill made the freeze all the more bone numbing.

Gray assisted Barstow up the ladder. The pilot had dislocated his arm when they crashed the Ski-Doo, and while they’d managed to pop it back into place, the limb was still painful and weak. After a bit of effort, everyone got inside.

Gray slammed the hatch against the polar freeze and took a moment to bask in the warmth. His face burned painfully as it thawed. Frostbite was certainly a worry, but at least he could still feel the tip of his nose.

He followed the others into the heart of the module, which appeared to be one of those residential pods, broken into bedrooms, a communal bathroom, and a gymnasium. Everything was decorated in primary colors, designed to compensate for the endless monotony of this frozen world. As his nasal passages continued to thaw, he also smelled the cedar scents from the wall planks, another psychological trick to mitigate for the lack of plants and greenery.

They all gathered in a small central common room, which held a table and chairs. Several of the rescued researchers had already retreated to various bunkrooms, likely shell-shocked and exhausted. Others leaned on walls, wearing dour, worried expressions.

They had full right to look that way
.

Jason spoke, “We were able to catch up with the John Deere. Think we spooked the tractor driver as we all piled up on his tail. But at least his path was easy to follow. Once we got here, we fired up the module’s generator.” The kid waved to the smatter of lights. “Unfortunately we have no way to radio out.”

Kowalski clapped Jason on the back. “You found this goddamned place. That’s more than enough to win you a cigar.” Proving himself a man of his word, he pulled a cellophane-wrapped stogie from an inside pocket of his parka and handed it to Jason. He then looked around. “It’s okay to smoke in here, right?”

“Not normally,” Karen said. “But considering the circumstances, I’ll make an exception.”

“Then I could get used to this place.” Kowalski stalked off, perhaps looking for a quiet place to light up.

Gray turned to more practical matters. “What’s the status of food and water?”

“No food in the module,” Jason answered. “Only what the tractor driver brought with him. It was meant to last him several days in case he got stranded, but his reserves are not nearly enough to cover our numbers. Water shouldn’t be a problem, though. We can always melt snow or ice.”

“Then we’ll have to ration what food we have.” Gray turned next to Karen as she sank to a seat, her face wan and tired. “About what happened . . . those munitions that blew off that chunk of ice must have been buried for some time. How could that be?”

“I can only hazard a guess. The bombs could’ve been drilled into place and frozen over long before the station arrived.”

“Is that possible?”

“It wouldn’t be that hard,” she speculated. “We shifted Halley VI closer to the sea about three months ago, so the climate scientists could complete their study of the accelerating thaw of the continent’s ice sheets. Our move had been mapped out and scheduled a full year in advance, including picking the coordinates for our new location.”

Gray considered this. “So somebody with such foreknowledge could’ve easily laid this trap, ready to destroy the station at a whim.”

“Yes, but it still doesn’t explain why.”

“Perhaps it has something to do with Professor Harrington’s research. Your station acts as the gateway to Queen Maud Land, where the professor’s group set up shop. If somebody wanted to suddenly isolate that secret site, getting rid of Halley VI would be an important first step.”

She looked even more ashen.

He asked, “Do you have any idea
what
Harrington was working on?”

Karen shook her head. “No, but that doesn’t mean rumors didn’t spread about what was going on out there. Stories ranged from the discovery of a lost Nazi base to the secret testing of nuclear weapons—which was done in this region by your own country, I might add, back in 1958. But all of this is wild conjecture at best.”

Still, whatever the truth was, it was clearly worth killing over.

And likely still is
.

He glanced to one of the triangular windows. “We’ll need to post lookouts. All sides of the module. And at least one person patrolling outside, watching the skies.”

Karen stood from the table. “I’ll begin arranging shifts.”

“One other thing,” Jason said before she left. He pointed to a figure in oil-stained coveralls. “Carl says he can stay with the John Deere.”

The man nodded. He must be the tractor driver.

“Its cabin is heated,” Jason added. “Carl can tweak our position to keep the module under the fog flowing down from the coast. It should help hide us.”

Gray admitted it was a solid plan. But how long could they hold out?

And more worrisome:
Who would find them first?

11:43
P
.
M
.

As midnight approached, Jason pulled into his parka and gathered his gloves, scarf, and goggles. He was scheduled for the first shift of the new day. They changed patrols on the hour, to avoid anyone standing watch for too long out in the frigid weather.

While he had taken a nap in preparation for his shift, he felt far from rested, nagged by worries.

And I’m certainly not looking forward to the next sixty cold minutes
.

Once suited up, he headed to the hatch. He found Joe Kowalski leaning against the frame. He had the smoldering stub of cigar between his back molars, looking like he’d been chewing on it for a while.

“Shouldn’t you be catching some shut-eye?” Jason asked. Sigma’s demolitions expert was scheduled to relieve him at 1
A
.
M
.

“Couldn’t sleep.” He took out his cigar and pointed its glowing tip at Jason. “You be careful out there. From what I hear, Crowe’s got big hopes for you. Don’t go getting yourself killed.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

“That’s just the thing,
planning’s
got nothing to do with it. It’s the unexpected that’ll bite you in the ass every time. Blindside the hell out of you.”

Jason nodded, recognizing the practical wisdom buried behind those gruff words. He stepped to move past Kowalski, when he noted a small photo clutched in the man’s thick fingers. Before Jason could get more than a glimpse of the woman in the picture, Kowalski tucked the photo away.