Free Ice Station by Matthew Reilly

Eagle” automatic pistol sounded like a
     cannon. The French commando's head exploded in a splash of red as
     both rounds found their mark on the bridge of his nose. His head
     jolted back sharply—twice—and he dropped instantly out of
     sight
    “Get out of there, Scarecrow! Move!” Riley's
     voice yelled through Schofield's earpiece.
    “I'm almost there!” Schofield yelled above the gunfire.
    Suddenly another voice came over the intercom.
    It was calm, clinical. There was no gunfire in the background behind
     it.
    “Marine Force, this is Snake, I am still at my post outside.
     I report that I now have visual on six more hostiles exiting the
     second French hovercraft. I repeat I am looking at six more armed men
     disembarking the French hovercraft and approaching the main entrance
     of the station.”
    A sudden jarring shot rang out over the intercom. Snake Kaplan's
     sniper rifle.
    “Marine Force, this is Snake. Make that five more hostiles
     approaching the main entrance of the station.”
    Schofield looked back at the tunnel leading to the main entrance
     behind him. That was where he and Gant were heading. Riley and
     Hollywood were there right now, firing at the dining room. Beside
     them, Sergeant Mitch “Ratman” Healy was doing the same.
    And then suddenly, without warning, Healy's chest exploded. Shot
     from behind by a high-powered weapon.
    Healy convulsed violently as a gout of blood spewed out from his rib
     cage. The force of the impact and the subsequent nervous convulsion
     bent his back forward at an obscene angle, and Schofield heard a
     sickening crack as the young soldier's spine broke.
    Riley and Hollywood were out of the entrance passageway in a
     nanosecond. As they fired into the tunnel behind them, at some unseen
     enemy, they backed quickly toward the nearest rung-ladder that led
     down to B-deck.
    Unfortunately, since they had only just arrived at the station, the
     six Marines who had gone with Riley to investigate the crashed
     hovercraft had been gathered around the main entrance passageway when
     the fighting had broken out. Which meant that now they were caught
     in between two hostile forces: one in the dining room in
     front of them and another coming in through the main entrance behind
     them.
    Schofield saw this. “Book! Go down! Go down! Take your guys down
     to B-deck!”
    “Already on it, Scarecrow.”
    Schofield and Gant were in an even worse position. Caught out on the
     catwalk between the dining room and the main entrance passageway, they
     had nowhere to go, no doorways to hide behind, no passageways to duck
     into. Just a metal catwalk three feet wide, bounded on one side by a
     sheer ice wall and on the other by a seventy-foot drop.
    And any second now the second French team would be bursting in through
     the main entrance passageway and Schofield and Gant would be the first
     thing they saw.
    A chunk of ice exploded next to Schofield's head, and he spun
     around. Petard was back on his feet in the dining room. Firing hard
     with his assault rifle. Schofield leveled his Desert Eagle at the
     dining room and fired six rapid shots back at Petard.
    He looked back at the main entrance.
    Ten seconds, at the most.
    “Shit,” he said aloud, looking at Gant, limp in his arms.
     “Shit.”
    He looked down over the railing of the catwalk and saw the pool of
     water way down at the bottom of the station. It couldn't have been
     more than sixty or seventy feet. They could survive the fall . . . .
    No way.
    Schofield looked at the catwalk on which he stood and then at the ice
     wall behind him.
    Better.
    “Scarecrow, you better get out of there!” It was
     Montana. He was now out on the catwalk, on the southern side of the
     station. From where he was standing he could see into the main
     entrance tunnel on the northern side. Whatever he saw there wasn't
     good.
    “I'm trying, I'm trying,” Schofield said.
    Schofield fired off two more shots at Petard in the dining room