Read Online Dry Ice by Bill Evans, Marianna Jameson - Free Book Online Page B

who agrees to fly onto the Ice at this time of year can have no fear of death. The window for flights closed six weeks ago. Everyone knows that no one should attempt to fly in until August barring a life-or-death emergency, which this isn’t. There won’t even be any internal flights for months. To send a flight in from Capetown now just for the sake of corporate politics is beyond foolhardy. And Flint’s plan is not only stupid, it will destroy the project. We both know that.”
    “Let me—”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. You had the opportunity to act and, with your exquisite foresight,” Greg said, sarcasm seeping through his silky calm, “you failed to do so. Now you’re helpless, Alexander. If I leave TESLA, your career is over. You will lose your direct link to the array and you’ll be back to fetching coffee for the real brass. The price of your weakness is that you’ve been taken out of the equation. I ’ m making the decisions now. Bringing down that plane is imperative. There is no other alternative. If that—” bitch “—woman arrives here, there will be questions raised that you and I long ago agreed must never be asked.”
    “Listen to me, Greg. I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll pull strings and shut down the flight. That will give us time—”
    “Haven’t you been paying attention, Alexander? You’re out of time. And luck. You can’t stop the flight. The U.S. military has no jurisdiction over TESLA. The air fleet is flagged in South Africa specifically to keep you out of the mix. The planes belong to Flint and the crews are Flint employees. The ice we’re sitting on is in Australian territory, as you know, and the Aussies are hardly going to interfere with our internal operations without a good reason. We’ve given them a lot of money to keep them out of our hair. So the harsh reality is that only Flint can stop the flight, and that is unlikely at this point. They’ve declared war on me.”
    “War? Greg, be reasonable.”
    “I’m being eminently reasonable, Alexander. You’re the one panicking. Listen to yourself.”
    “Let me—for God’s sake, you can’t take out a plane—Flint won’t like the publicity.”
    “Is that the best reason you can come up with? Given all that pungent desperation in your voice, I was expecting a morality play in three acts,” Greg said with a smile that had grown wider during the call. “I have no fears of publicity. There won’t be any. Flint won’t allow anything to raise the profile down here, any more than you will. By the time news of the plane crash makes it into the paper, if it does at all, it will be on page fifteen, lower left corner, and the flight will have become a pleasure trip gone bad, an accident attributed to a sloppy crew operating in old aircraft during bad weather and without authorization.”
    After thirty seconds of listening to the admiral breathing heavily while trying to find new ideas, Greg nodded to himself. “I’ll assume your silence implies consent. Thanks for your time, Alexander. I wish you much success in your future endeavors.”
    Greg disconnected the call, set the small unit back into its charger, and spun to face one of the large flat-screen monitors on his desk. In seconds, he’d pulled up a map of the Antarctic continent, then zoomed in to their small slice of it.
    Their position, so close to the South Geomagnetic Pole, prevented him from creating weather too close to home, but a sudden Antarctic storm near the coast would be an occurrence so commonplace as to be hardly worth a mention. The fact that he had granted the pilot weather clearance she needed to take off would further allay any suspicion. After all, everyone knew not to fly if Greg Simpson, master of the weather, didn’t give the okay.
    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,