Dry Ice (41 page)

With a soft sigh, one of the housekeepers dropped to the floor in a loose-limbed heap. Kendra, the installation’s physician, pushed through the crowd to her side.

“Let’s get her straightened out. Somebody get something to elevate her feet.” She looked up from the prostrate woman and met Tess’s eyes.

“Is this for real?” the doctor demanded.

“Yes,” Tess said simply.

“So let’s get in the planes and fly out,” Kendra demanded. “Let’s get moving.”

“It wouldn’t help, Kendra. When gravity is disrupted, the last place you’d want to be is in the air,” Nik said.

“But if we left now—”

“We wouldn’t get far enough away,” he snapped. “It’s not an option, Kendra.”

“So we just stay here and die?” Kendra said as she rose to her feet, with fear and fire blazing in her eyes, forgetting her patient, who was moaning slightly.

“No. We won’t just sit and wait, Kendra. We need to stop the arrays from powering up, or at least from aggregating their frequencies.” Tess looked around at the people in the room and her gaze came to rest on Dan Thornton. “Any ideas?”

“We don’t have to worry about powering down, Tess, because the arrays can’t be powered up like that. To get the arrays to do what you’re talking about, getting all the arrays humming at full power at once, would require a hell of a lot of power and we don’t have that kind of dedicated power,” he said, arms folded across his chest. “Doing that would drain every fuel cell out there. And you’d need more to boot.”

The group had begun to murmur, and Tess knew everyone liked what he’d said, and would believe him over her.

I wish I could believe him.

She frowned at him and held up her hands to quiet the crowd. “Dan, I don’t want to contradict you, but the arrays are already powering up. Could they be programmed to pull extra power directly from the wind turbines?”

“Even if we had a Force Ten gale blowing out there, the conversion from the wind turbines wouldn’t take place fast enough to provide the kind of juice you’re talking about. Besides, have you been outside in the past few hours? There’s practically no wind.”

“Are you sure? I mean, about the power? Are you
absolutely sure
?”

“Never been more sure of anything.”

She looked at Nik, who let the shadow of a smile cross his face, then at Kendra, who looked slightly less pissed off than she had a minute ago. Tess felt the weight of the world slide from her shoulders and she slumped, as she started to laugh. “Dan, I think I love you.”

The tension in the room broke, and the sound of soft laughter mingled with pent-up sobs finally released. People held one another in fierce, silent hugs.

Kendra walked the few steps to Tess. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Don’t,” Tess interrupted her. “You were right to question me.”

As she spoke, the lights flickered for nearly a full minute. The room had fallen silent, except for a round of gasps.

Tess felt her knees begin to shimmy. She looked at Nik and saw true alarm on his face for the first time. Dan had gone pale and was already at a computer, key-stroking savagely. The lights flickered several more times, then blinked off. The emergency lights came on instantly, bathing the room in an eerie blue glow as a dozen alarms started sounding at once: the installation’s emergency alarms, the backup power supplies for the computers. The door to the control room slid open and locked in place.

“Dan?” Tess asked shakily. “What’s happening?”

“The power supply for the installation has been breached. It’s being fed to the arrays,” he said, not looking away from the monitor.

Tess felt her brain freeze for a second, as if all activity to the molecular level stopped as her mind absorbed the situation. “That can’t happen, Dan. They’re discrete systems with a one-way flow. We can pull power from the array power station, but the habitat can’t feed power to it,” she said, her voice raspy.

Shaking his head, Dan slowly looked up from the screen. “I know that, but it’s happening. It’s some sort of embedded override.”

“Can you stop it?”

Dan held her gaze for a second, then returned his attention to the monitor without answering.

Tess turned to face Nik, who was at her side. “Greg is betting it all, Nik,” she whispered hoarsely, trying and failing to keep her own terror in check. “When all that power goes to the arrays, they’ll blow up. We’ll have no life support. We can’t let this happen.”

“Tess, we don’t have an option,” he said softly. “We can’t kill the power to the arrays. The system won’t let us.”

She turned then to the dozens of pale faces, many streaked with tears, that were focused on her with an intensity that was frightening. “Everyone needs to get in their survival gear and move to the growth station.”

People who had already started to move toward the door stopped as another voice cut through the room.

“The arrays are starting to power up.” Jonah’s voice was strangled.

Tess knew the people in the room were stretched to their emotional limit; she was, too. She couldn’t blame them for starting to lose it as the mutterings and sobs became higher and angrier. She turned to Nik and was about to speak when she met Dan’s eyes—bright, furious, and full of a fighter’s challenge.

“I don’t know about you, Tess,” he said quietly, “but I’m not quite ready to fucking die. I’d rather go out there and take an ax to the feed horn on the arrays or a fucking sledgehammer and kill the power station than sit here whinging until I freeze to death.”

Kill the power station.

The room was still crowded but absolutely silent. Tess felt as if she’d been struck by lightning.

Her whole body was trembling, but she made her voice as steady as she could. “Dan, what’s the biggest plane you have in the hangar?”

He stared at her in disbelief. “You want to fly out?”

“No. What’s the biggest plane?”

“The Dash 7.”

“Let’s get out to the hangar.”

He folded his arms across his wide chest. “What the fuck are ye on about, Tess? I’m not leaving these people here to take you anywhere.”

“I’m not asking you to take me anywhere but to the hangar,” she said, her eyes boring into his. “We need to cut the power to the arrays. That’s the only thing that will stop what Greg is planning. We can’t do it using the computers. One man and an ax isn’t, either. That leaves us with one option: we need to go to the source. The fuel cells. I’m going to drive the plane into the power station.”

“What?”
Nik demanded.

“It’s the only way,” she said. “The building was built to withstand gale force winds, Nik, but not a direct impact.”

“Tess, it’s suicide,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper. “You can’t do it.”

She bit the inside of her lip hard against the sudden flood of emotion that swamped her. “Staying here and doing nothing is suicide, too, Nik. I have to do this. If I’m not successful, we all die. If I am successful, only I die. It’s the only choice.”

“No.”

“Don’t argue with me, Nik. You’ll undermine my authority,” she said with a shaky laugh through building tears. “I have to do this. The captain goes down with the ship.” She turned to Dan. “On the way out to the hangar, you can tell me what to do. I know the power station for the arrays is the low building at the side of the far end of the runway. All you need to do is point me in the right direction and tell me how to hit the accelerator. Then you leave.”

Dan, looking a little pale behind his cocky smile, set his gaze on her and shook his head. “There’s no fucking way I’m letting
you
drive
my
Dash 7 into a fucking building full of fucking
hydrogen fuel cells.
In me arse, woman.
I’ll
do it.”

“No, you won’t. Don’t argue with me, Dan. That’s an order.”

“There will be a lot of fireworks. They’ll see it at McMurdo.” He paused. “There’s no fucking way I’m missing a show like that.”

“It’ll be the first time I see fireworks from the inside,” Tess said, forcing a tight smile. She turned to Nik and made herself meet his eyes, hating the pain she saw in them.

“I know this is a bad time for what-ifs, but you should have tracked me down in Moscow. I’ve always wondered what would have happened with us if we had half a chance,” she whispered, then cleared her throat and addressed the group. “Ron, I want your guys to try to pull back the power that’s being diverted from the installation. This place won’t stay comfortable for long without it. The rest of you, get into survival gear. Nik’s in charge.” She turned to Dan. “Let’s go, big guy.”

Without another word or backward glance, the two of them left the room.

CHAPTER
33

Nik was stunned at Tess’s decision. He turned back to the silent group and moved toward the desk she’d been using. “Ron, Lindy, let’s try to get that power back. If we can’t divert the flow, then we’ll try to stop it. I don’t care how. Etienne, you guys keep throwing everything you can at the arrays. Kendra, you get down there and follow Tess and Dan at a safe distance. Take someone with you. If they survive the crash and the explosion, they’re going to need you. Fizz, you and the others go through the habitat and turn off everything that’s not critical, even emergency systems. I want to have the lowest possible power load running when we pull this back.”

“When?”

Nik turned to Fizz, who wore a vestige of her usual wide smile. “Excuse me?”

“You just said ‘when.’ I liked hearing that,” she said as she turned to leave the room.

*   *   *

Teke sat in the first front-row seat of the sleek, narrow cabin of the Air Force’s newest jet, the Peregrine Hypersonic Transport vehicle. The oddly shaped aircraft was made for exactly this type of mission, to get small, rapid-strike teams into place as fast as humanly possible. It flew higher, farther, and faster than anything else on earth, dropping altitude and speed only when it needed to be refueled in midair or to deliver its human cargo to a drop zone.

In four minutes, the team would begin to tumble out of the plane at 20,000 feet, dropping at a terminal velocity of well over one hundred miles an hour in approximately two minutes before opening their parachutes at 3,500 feet. They’d “hop and pop” their parachutes behind the installation’s airplane hangar and cover one hundred yards of ground on foot to storm the habitat. As soon as they secured it, they’d send up a signal flare and a C-17 circling out of radar range would land to pick up whoever was there, friend or foe, dead or alive.

The Peregrine wasn’t a quiet plane but it had been a quiet flight; the aircraft flew at such high altitudes that it typically avoided the weather variables conventional airplanes had to deal with. Teke was cautiously optimistic that the notoriously wild Antarctic winter weather would behave itself long enough for the guys to drop. The reports of the weather on the ground were surprisingly positive.

The entire jump team had been on oxygen since they’d reached 5,000 feet, just to ensure that their bodies would be able to handle the dangerous combination of extremely high altitude, rapid changes in air pressure, and temperatures as low as seventy degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The dangers they faced went far beyond the high-speed descent they’d endure. The change in air pressure as they fell could induce severe decompression and a shortage of oxygen could induce hypoxia. Either condition could lead to death if the jumper became disoriented and was unable to perform the rapid sequence of critical tasks that needed to be completed before the chute could be opened.

The aerospace physiology technician, or PT, was moving among the team, checking each person for the slightest indication that they weren’t in peak form. The team members themselves checked and rechecked their equipment and reflexes. But despite the importance of their mission, the men sharing the cabin with Teke appeared as unconcerned as if they were a bunch of bureaucrats taking the rush-hour Red Line from Dupont Circle to Bethesda. Then again, taking on the worst, riskiest situations was what these guys trained for and lived for. Teke knew all about it. He’d spent ten years as a SEAL before opting to go political.

These guys usually take out Islamic jihadists who carry shoulder-mounted rocket launchers in their man-purses. Neutralizing a group of unarmed scientists should be a piece of cake.

Teke closed his eyes to get back into the mental zone he needed to be in; a few seconds later, a hand shook his arm and he looked into the face of the PT. She motioned with a jerk of her thumb that he should move toward the bulkhead. He picked up a handset attached to the wall and was patched into communications with the cockpit.

“What’s up?” he said.

“We got trouble. Look out the window,” said a voice.

Teke craned his head to peer through the small porthole. Stars were brilliant in a sky that was otherwise a dense, inky black. Then he spotted a small, brilliant, white-hot glow slightly ahead and far beneath them. It was shrinking as he watched.

“What is that?” he asked.

“A hydrogen fuel depot a hundred yards away from our drop zone. It just exploded. You’d need night-vision goggles to really see it. The stuff burns practically invisibly.”

Teke’s stomach dropped. Had they arrived a minute or two earlier, he and his team might have plummeted into the middle of that inferno. “So we’re aborting?”

“I’d suggest it, unless you’d like to go down and take a look at Hell from up close. It’s your call, admiral.”

Smart-ass fly boy.
“Can you patch me through to Washington?”

“Actually, sir,” came another, only slightly less sarcastic voice, “I have them holding on line two.”

*   *   *

Tess climbed up the steps of the plane behind Dan. She followed him into the cockpit, sat in the seat he pointed to, and looked around a little awkwardly. She’d looked into cockpits before, but she’d never actually sat in one or had a pilot’s eye view of one. She was surrounded by dials, switches, lights, levers, and screens—at eye level, on the ceiling, on both sides of the seats. There were even banks of them on the walls behind the pilots’ seats.