Dry Ice (8 page)

The weather on the vast Central Antarctic plateaus was always bad in the winter. Vicious storms often started with no warning and could last from hours to weeks. Having a clear sky turn into a blur of blowing, blinding snow within thirty minutes was routine. He was merely going to ensure that such a storm blew up when and where he needed it.

Greg glanced at the clocks on the wall; it was four-thirty in the afternoon in Connecticut and here at TESLA. It confused the hell out of rookies to learn that each research station on the Ice kept time with its sponsoring country or the country on which it relied for replenishment and emergency services.

It was only in the Antarctic that anyone really became fully aware that time was nothing more than a human construct, a completely arbitrary measurement. In the austral winter, there were twenty-four hours of darkness, in the summer, twenty-four hours of light. Theoretically, all time zones converged at the Geographical Pole; a person could cross all the world’s time zones in less than a minute by walking around the slim, flagged marker driven deep into the ice sheet.

Tess was scheduled to touch down on the installation’s blue-ice runway in approximately eight hours, which gave him plenty of time to assemble the command sequence necessary to create category-five hurricane force winds in the upper atmosphere. Lowering the high-altitude temperatures enough to damage the plane’s tires or freeze its hydraulic system would take slightly longer, but he had time. He could even wait to begin, if he wanted to.

He didn’t.

Greg leaned forward, intently scanning the map in front of him. The only real challenge in the whole exercise was deciding which global coordinate would be best suited for the death of Tess Beauchamp and the winged horse she was riding in on.

Somewhere over water. Near a coastline, but too far out to scramble a rescue team.

He zoomed in closer, then closer still, until he could see the detailed faces of the harsh, wind-scoured cliffs of Queen Maud Land’s long coastline. He clicked on a coordinate where the sea ice would be forming.

An excellent choice. The huge plane would pass over the area en route to TESLA. Between the treacherous winds and the dangers posed by the hardening sea, no rescue operation would be attempted. Not by sea, not by air.

Tess, over ice, with a twist of fate.

I’ll drink to that.

CHAPTER
5

Her tall, slender frame folded nearly in half to fit in the seat, Tess Beauchamp sat in the cold, rattling fuselage of the huge Ilyushin cargo plane, trying to will warmth to her fingertips and some sort of enthusiasm to her brain. But it wasn’t easy to get excited about heading into a war zone, even if it was just a corporate one. In Antarctica. In the throes of winter.

It was even more difficult knowing that what was waiting for her on the Ice was something of an emotional minefield.

Pushing farther into her eight layers of extreme-weather clothes, Tess tried once again to get comfortable. It was pointless. Her clothing left her feeling like a cross between the Michelin Man and the Pillsbury Doughboy. The ambient temperature in the stripped-down cabin hovered somewhere around not-cold-enough-to-kill-you; her “seat” was nothing more than nylon webbing slung between poles. She could hear nothing beyond the deafening thrum of the plane’s engines—right through her earplugs. Comfort was a far-off dream at the moment.

Surely with all the technology the world had to offer and all the money Flint AgroChemical had on hand, there was a more comfortable way of getting to the South Pole than on a retired Russian military aircraft that was probably older than Tess herself, piloted by a woman who looked young enough to be wearing a Girl Scout uniform instead of a flight suit. The pilot had told Tess she was a former U.S. military officer who’d logged plenty of time flying in and out of Antarctica, but Tess was having trouble getting past the fact that she looked and sounded like some Disney tween princess.

The rest of the flight crew, the backup flight crew, and Tess’s “entourage” from Flint HQ all seemed determined to keep themselves in the background. Tess hadn’t interacted with any of them in Capetown other than the lawyer and the HR director, and had barely seen those two since boarding. One five-person flight team had disappeared into the cockpit and the other had strapped themselves into their seats and fallen asleep. The two Flint executives had spent much of their time huddled over their laptops. The two security guys hadn’t said a word to her since they were introduced.

Tess knew she should have followed the backup flight crew’s example and just slept, but she was too keyed up. She’d booted up her own laptop and once again reviewed the information about the personnel at TESLA. At this point, they had been airborne for more than six hours, having left in the wee-hour darkness of a South African night. In another couple of hours, Tess would return to the coldest, driest, and, right now, darkest place on the surface of the earth. But the climate wasn’t what was bugging her. It was her host, or the man who’d be her host for the first five minutes, Greg Simpson.

Tess had good reason to despise Greg personally, but—although she’d never admit it aloud—she had to respect him, despite what Gianni had told her Greg had done with her research. Tess’s reputation was growing and well-deserved, but Greg had been an icon in the field of weather science for decades. Their colleagues universally acknowledged that he was a genius when it came to understanding the physics—some said metaphysics—of the atmosphere. He’d been a legend even way back when she was an undergrad. She’d wanted to work for him since she’d first heard his name.

When the time was right, she’d shamelessly pulled strings of all sorts to be interviewed for the three-year HAARP fellowship Greg granted to one post-doc student each year. She’d wowed him in the interview and won the gig. She couldn’t believe her luck. Working with Greg Simpson was the brass ring, the ruby slippers, the Holy Grail. And more than a little holy hell, as it turned out.

HAARP’s location in Gakona, Alaska, was everything she’d been warned it would be—flat, cold, and boring—but the work was everything she’d hoped it would be: mind-blowing. Working for Greg had also been everything she’d been warned about. Greg was more than just a taskmaster. He was a single-minded, ego-crushing slave driver who didn’t seem to need sleep, food, or downtime. And he never, ever let stupid human traits like compassion or empathy or understanding get in the way of his goals. She’d found that out firsthand when her grandmother had died unexpectedly.

Greg had been coldly accommodating when Tess said she needed to leave; despite the difficulties in getting from the interior of Alaska to anywhere in the lower forty-eight and back in a reasonable time frame, he’d extracted a promise from her that she’d be back in a week. Then her grandfather had suffered a massive stroke right after the funeral and had died the next day, leaving Tess and her family reeling from the compounded shock. Greg had quietly, surgically eviscerated her over the phone, going so far as to accuse her of fabricating calamities to take an unscheduled vacation, of not being able to cut it on the project. Then he’d demanded that she return in seventy-two hours or he’d pull her fellowship and kick her out of the program.

Somehow, Tess made it back before the deadline. She’d burst into Greg’s office like a human tornado, like a fire-breathing Amazon goddess, and, towering over him as he cringed at his desk, had proceeded to inform Greg of her opinion of him. At a decibel level that nearly damaged some of the transmitters half a mile away. Using language so creative and profane that Kathy Griffin would have wept with jealousy.

Amid the loud, thought-drubbing white noise of the aircraft engines, Tess smiled at the memory of that day. Telling Greg off had felt
wonderful.
Emancipating. Cleansing.

She’d composed herself somewhat by the time the military police arrived, summoned by one of the people in the outer office who had “overheard” her rage. The MPs had escorted her to her quarters to pack up her belongings—and as she’d stormed down the hall, she’d seen the stunned, somewhat admiring, openmouthed expressions on the faces of her colleagues. She’d seen the military cops biting their lips to keep from laughing as they followed her down the corridor.

But, despite Greg’s best efforts to ruin her, the incident hadn’t damaged her career. Not that Tess had hung around to find out if it would. She’d made a few calls and had gotten a job on a project as far away from Greg as she could possibly get: Antarctica.

Tess’s smile turned wry. She’d been in her mid-twenties back then, just coming up for air after a grueling span of years spent getting two master’s degrees and two doctorates. She knew now that it was more than grief and Greg’s insensitivity that had set her off—and that it might be time to make peace with him—but the incident had worked out to her advantage. She fell in love with the Ice.

Antarctica was remote from everywhere—and everyone—on earth. An island continent that belonged to no one, the last land-based frontier on the planet. A place where the weather was beyond wild; where the environment and terrain were harsh, practically alien, but possessed a savage beauty that could seduce and kill in the same moment.

She’d heard that each research station had its own culture and as a group were borderline tribal, and the stories enticed her. She’d been steeped for so many years in hard-core academia and swampy personal relationships that never had a chance to flourish—including a nascent romance with Nik Forde that ended when her fellowship did—that Tess had needed some wildness, some challenges that would force her to live by her wits as well as her reason.

Antarctica had been the perfect antidote to Greg’s toxicity. It was dangerous. Swashbuckling. And far, far away. Nothing about life on the Ice was ordinary; everything was extreme. Getting there was a marathon; adapting to the rhythmless pace of endless day and then endless night challenged both mind and body. Downtime meant spelunking through snow caves, climbing up the sheer ice faces of ancient formations, rappelling into virtually bottomless crevasses.

Tess realized she was smiling—a little ruefully—at the memories of that first trip. This one was her sixth and was completely different. One of the benefits of working with one of the world’s largest and wealthiest corporations was the ease with which the transition had taken place. A smooth, professional “relocation team” from Flint had stepped in and taken over her life—arranging for her apartment in Paris to be carefully mothballed, hiring a service to keep her plants fed and watered and her bills paid, supplying her with made-to-measure cold-weather gear and anything else she thought she’d need on the Ice. All she’d had to do was pack what she wanted to take with her and hop on the luxurious corporate jet that whisked her from Paris to Greenwich, Connecticut. Once there, she’d been treated like royalty while being briefed on every aspect of TESLA.

Despite all the flattery and special treatment, Tess had kept herself firmly focused on the professional aspects of the task ahead of her, and had just as firmly avoided considering her motives for taking it on. She wasn’t naïve enough to think that there hadn’t been a lot of discussion in Flint’s boardroom about whether, given her history, she should be Greg’s replacement. She was equally sure that the executives had speculated on her reasons for accepting the job. But the answers were simple. She truly was the only person qualified to take it over, and it was a logical next step in her career. Government and academic positions had been her past and would be abundant if she wanted to make them part of her future. But TESLA was the cutting-edge present.

Tess glanced around again at the cargo plane’s ugly, cavernous, utilitarian space. Fire extinguishers and personal-sized oxygen canisters were clipped to the walls, along with first-aid kits and some ominously unlabeled black boxes. Farther down the back, huge flat red panels hung snugly against the frame. They were the heavy-duty, inflatable life rafts. Not that she could ever imagine that a craft so flimsy could ensure anyone’s survival in a body of water as cold and treacherous as the Southern Ocean as it was forming its massive seasonal expanse of ship-crushing sea ice. She shook off the thought.

The only good thing about the trip was that it was almost over. In good weather—a relative concept in Antarctica—the lumbering plane with its odd, glass-enclosed nose could make the trip from Capetown to TESLA in about seven hours. But in this kind of weather—in a word, dreadful—they couldn’t fly as high or as fast. Frankly, she was surprised they were flying at all. But the weather had been okay when they departed and had remained so until well after they’d passed the BSR—the point Beyond Safe Return, when they were committed to keep going because they didn’t have enough fuel to turn around and make it back to Capetown. But she’d learned that this odd-looking Russian plane was slightly more versatile than other aircraft because it sported twenty-four low-pressure wheels instead of ski landing gear like most other Antarctic-bound planes.

Tess sighed and closed her eyes again, and tried once more to get comfortable. In just under two hours, they’d land on TESLA’s blue-ice runway on the East Antarctic Polar Plateau, and she and the equipment surrounding her would be off-loaded. She could get out, stretch her legs, reacquaint herself with the true meanings of the words
cold
and
dark,
then bundle Greg Simpson onto the plane and take over as director and lead researcher at TESLA.

And that, by all accounts, would make a lot of people happy. Except Greg.

The installation was Greg’s baby. His magnum opus. Quite possibly his life. Which was exactly why the company wanted him stateside.

Tess felt a sharp tug on her shoulder just as the plane hit a patch of turbulent air that made her stomach lurch. Opening her eyes, she saw a blaze-orange Michelin Man shape swaying in front of her and glanced up to the person’s face.

The first officer, long and lean underneath the flight gear, was clinging to a strap that hung from the ceiling.