Nimec didn’t reply. He was conscious of the wind barreling outside.
Megan studied his face.
“There’s more on your mind,” she said.
He waited a moment, then nodded.
“Working with Tom Ricci these past couple of years… I suppose the way he thinks outside the box has started to rub off on me. Something about the rover disappearing, and then those people who went looking for it, makes me suspicious. Or maybe that’s going too far, using too strong a word. It makes me wonder. I’m not sure about what. I figure the reason I’m not sure is there’s probably nothing to it. But I’ve been on my job so long, I can’t stop wondering. It’s instinct. Doesn’t matter where I am. Doesn’t matter that it’s pretty hard to imagine who’d want to make trouble for us here, interfere with what we’re doing. Or how they could. I’m looking for answers when I can’t even decide if there are any logical questions.” He paused, moved his shoulders. “I wish I could put it to you straighter.”
“You’ve been straight enough,” Megan said. “I never disregard your instincts, Pete. We need to talk more about this.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s late, and I want to sit on my thoughts a little longer, give them a chance to work themselves out.” He paused. “That’s why I waited to bring them up.”
Megan looked at him. The blowing wind and snow slammed aggressively against the window.
“I’m supposed to meet Annie for drinks,” she said. “You can join us if you like. It might make the waiting easier. For you and me.”
Nimec was quiet.
“Better not,” he said then. “Don’t think I’d be very good company.”
She stood looking at him a few seconds, nodded.
“We’ll be at the bar if you change your mind. You know where it is?”
“I can find it.”
She nodded again, and started away down the silent corridor.
“Meg?”
She paused, half turned toward Nimec.
“I almost forgot to mention you run one hell of a lodge,” he said.
Megan smiled warmly at him.
“Appreciated,” she said.
Burkhart heard a cannonade in the southern distance: long rolling rumbles, a bellowy roar, then a rending crash. Someone less familiar with Antarctica might have mistaken the din for thunder, but that was an infrequent occurrence on the continent. Instead he knew it to be a berg calving from the ice sheet, its great tortured mass breaking off into the sea, the stresses of its division accelerated by the storm.
As the sounds continued rocketing across the sky, he set his full attention on the dome some eighty or ninety feet up ahead. His men waited at his sides, snow whipping around them, their snowmobiles left a short distance back. The vehicles would have made this final stretch of ground easier to cross, and Burkhart was convinced the wind would have muted the buzzing of their engines even if they had ridden straight into the center of the compound. Still, he’d taken no chances and ordered his group to dismount.
Given a choice, Burkhart would have vastly preferred the storm’s assault had not coincided with their mission. But he had refused to be stopped by caprices of the weather, and decided what couldn’t be helped might be turned to his advantage. For one thing, it reduced the likelihood of his men encountering base personnel — almost certainly they would shelter in until conditions improved. It was also just as well he would not have to worry about the observation cameras mounted high on the desalinization plant’s dome. To his knowledge, no other Antarctic research base had any real perimeter surveillance, a measure believed pointless in an environment that gave natural safe haven from attack… and unworkable besides. Nor did the rest of the installations maintain defensive forces. While UpLink had broken with convention and done what it could on both accounts, the cameras were little more than token reminders. Scarecrows to frighten the birds away from the crop field. Having learned about them independently from Granger and the captive scientist, Burkhart had originally planned to steal past blind spots in their placement and motion patterns, and if necessary knock out those that presented the most serious threat of detection. He had been bothered by the thought that disabling them could trip an alarm and alert the facility’s security contingent to his team’s presence nonetheless, but that too had ceased to be a meaningful consideration.
Once he’d learned of the storm’s approach, Burkhart had become sure it would incapacitate the cameras, and what he saw now supported his confidence. Cataracted with snow, their lenses stared outward from the roof of the dome like blank, blind eyes.
There would be nothing to come in the way of his entry.
His submachine gun held at the ready, he led his men forward through the battering wind. He estimated its speed at close to forty knots, strong enough to rock him on his heels — and the worst of the storm was still many miles and hours to the south. When its brunt finally struck, Burkhart realized travel of any kind would be out of the question.
His team reached the dome, circled to its slatted roll-down door, and gathered before it. Ever cautious, Burkhart paused a moment to glance up at a security camera, noting its white-filmed lens with reassurance. Then he bent, unfastened the door’s wind locks with a gloved hand, grasped its handle, and raised it.
Recessed overhead lighting bathed the structure’s interior in a soft, even glow. Burkhart entered with a quick step, Langern and three of the other men following closely, lowering the door behind them, the rest of his team taking watch positions outside the dome. After all he had led them through, knowing the dangerous return journey they faced, it was odd to consider they would only need minutes to execute their job. But something would have to go very wrong for it to take longer.
He scanned the enclosure from behind his goggles, listening to the continuous hum of working machinery. On a large steel platform, an array of three water-distillation, treatment, and storage tanks — their respective functions stencil-painted on their exteriors — was connected to an intricate mesh of pumps, intake and outlet valves, hoses, PVC pressure lines, and electronic metering and control consoles. A pair of wide main pipelines curved downward from the distillation tank through the platform and then deep into the ice underneath. These, in turn, led outward to branching feed ducts, where seawater melted by recaptured exhaust heat from the base’s power generators was forced up through reverse-osmosis filters into the tanks.
It was a clean and energy efficient system, Burkhart mused. An impressive system. That he would have to cripple it gave him a strange twinge he’d experienced on occasion throughout his career as a soldier of fortune. Perceived but unidentified, the feeling would brush past him like a stray, vagabond brother who’d been missing since childhood, his existence nearly faded from memory.
And then, as always, it was gone. Burkhart stepped up onto the platform and called for one of the men to join him. An Austrian named Koenig, he approached briskly, well prepared for his role in the operation.
“Place the TH3 under here.” Burkhart moved to the distillation tank’s inflow pump, touched a hand to the metal plate over its motor. He thought a moment, then indicated the valve where the seawater pipeline connected to the pump. “And here. On these plastic lines as well. It will simply look as if the fire spread to them from the motor housing. “Du seist das?” He paused. “Be sure to give the charges a five-minute delay.”