Read Online Terminal Freeze by Lincoln Child - Free Book Online Page B

“Quiet on the set!” bellowed the cameraman. All chatter immediately faded.
    Conti raised his eyes to the cave.
“Action!”
    A digital clapstick snapped and the cameras rolled. Simultaneously, the heavy equipment started up with ear-splitting roars. With a grinding of gears, they lurched toward the face of the glacier. Conti and his small knot of assistants swung in behind. The cameramen stood back, panning carefully, getting everything in. With a huge sense of reluctance, Marshall followed the procession toward the cave. He had a horrible sinking feeling that Conti’s hubris was going to make victims of them all.
    At the cave mouth, the vehicles paused to let some of the roustabouts pull a few of the canvas duffels off the flatbed. Then, powerful searchlights snapped on atop the yellow cabs, clutches popped, and the equipment rolled forward again, more slowly now, disappearing under the low roof of the cave. Marshall and the rest followed single file. The chill dry air of the lava pipe grew heavy with diesel fumes. The walls vibrated madly, and the sound of the engines was deafening. Glancing over his shoulder, Marshall noticed that-under the direction of a burly crew foreman named Creel-the roustabouts were pulling the steel spacers from the duffels and snugging them into place between floor and ceiling. This temporary bracing made him feel only marginally better.
    He made his way down the tunnel. There was no need for a flashlight: the searchlights on the cabs and the camera illumination turned the cave into a tube of brilliant blue. There was a deep scraping noise ahead as one of the vehicles forced its way beneath the lowlying ceiling. Marshall noticed even Sully’s resolutely bluff expression pale at this.
    Then the cave widened, the ceiling rose, and the little company quickly formed a circle around the cleared spot in the ice floor. The diesels cut off, one after the other, and for a moment the silence seemed deafening. A faint staccato crackling echoed in the chamber as the ice floor settled under the weight of the big machines. The roustabouts finished buttressing the cave with the spacers, then hung back at the periphery.
    For a moment, nobody spoke. Everyone looked down at the large dead eyes that stared back up at them from the ice. Marshall glanced at the assembled company, one by one. Ekberg, frowning, looking troubled. Barbour, making brisk notations on her palmtop. Conti, gazing into the cloudy ice, his complacency clearly shaken. Faraday, blinking through oversize spectacles as he pulled measuring equipment from his pockets. Sully, beaming with something like paternal pride.
    Finally, Conti roused himself. “Fortnum, Toussaint, you getting this?”
    “Affirmative,” said the DP.
    “You’ve panned across the scientists?”
    “Twice.”
    “Very well.” The producer turned toward Sully. “Mark out the animal, please.”
    Sully cleared his throat. “Mark out?”
    “The block of ice we’ll be cutting from the cave floor. Be generous-we’d hate to slice off a drumstick by accident.”
    Sully winced, but he stepped gamely forward and-after a few whispered consultations with Faraday-made some calculations, then scratched out a crude oblong in the ice with his penknife.
    “Depth?” Creel asked.
    Sully looked at Barbour, who consulted her palmtop. “Two point seven meters,” she said.
    Creel turned to the man at the vehicle’s control console. “Make it two point eight.”
    Once again, the cave filled with the roar of a diesel engine and dense clouds of exhaust. As the cameras rolled, another of the roustabouts used a handheld remote to guide a heavy mechanical arm on the strange-looking machine into position over the ice. Slowly, he lowered it onto Sully’s etching.
    “Stand back,” Creel warned.
    A beam of intense red light appeared at the tip of the instrument. Immediately, the ice beneath the beam began to spit and boil. “Military-grade laser,” Conti said. “Very powerful, yet more