On Thin Ice

by Debra Lee Brown

  “I—I didn’t know they were special,” he sputtered. “There was no label, so I—”

  Jack dropped the crowbar and, to Lauren’s shock, grabbed the kid by the shirt collar. “What did you do with them?”

  Lauren stopped breathing. Salvio wouldn’t really hurt him, would he?

  “I—I did what we’re supposed to do. I opened ’em up. Looked at ’em. They were weird. Didn’t look like all the other ones.” He nodded at the open crates, eyes wide.

  “Then what?” Salvio twisted the kid’s collar, and Lauren watched in horror as his face turned red.

  “I went to find—”

  “Who?”

  “That—that geologist. Like we’re supposed to if something like this happens.”

  “Damn!” Salvio turned him loose.

  “But—but I didn’t find her, and when I asked Pinkie he said not to bother her. That the samples were mistakes. That they didn’t need no label, and that I—I shouldn’t put ’em in with the rest. He—he was gonna take care of ’em later, he said.”

  Salvio put a leathery hand to his face and exhaled in what Lauren could plainly see was relief. The roustabout’s face relaxed, his normal color returning.

  “So, where are they then?”

  Salvio turned at the sound of her voice, as she stepped from the shadows. His face turned to stone before her eyes. She refused to let it faze her.

  “The samples?” the kid croaked.

  Salvio’s face went beet red. Lauren breathed, willing herself to remain calm and cool as she watched the vein in his neck pulse.

  “Yes,” she said. “The unmarked samples. What did you do with them?”

  “Lauren, get…your…ass…back…to…camp.” Salvio’s voice shook like she’d never heard it. He moved toward her, but she forced herself to hold her ground.

  The roustabout moved with him. “I tossed ’em.”

  Salvio froze, his eyes nearly bulging out of his head. “What?” He whirled on the kid. “Where?”

  The kid took two steps back. “Pinkie said they were mistakes. So I…th-thought I was doing him a favor.”

  “You didn’t want to get anyone into trouble,” Lauren said, trying to defuse the situation. “I can understand that.”

  He nodded vigorously. “Th-that’s right. Pinkie said—”

  “Where? Where did you toss ’em?” Salvio had forgotten about her, now, and focused all his attention on the terrified young roustabout.

  “I—in the reserve pit.”

  Lauren closed her eyes and counted to ten. Salvio swore, every word in the book.

  “When?” she said.

  “Y-yesterday. No, the day before.”

  The unmarked samples were as good as gone. The reserve pit held over five-thousand gallons of overflow muck from the well, most of which would have already circulated through a recycling system that crushed any rocks or debris in preparation for trucking the mud out when they finished the job.

  “Get outta my sight,” Salvio said to the kid.

  The roustabout didn’t waste time. He was gone in a flash. Lauren jumped as the heavy metal door slammed shut behind him.

  Now it was just the two of them.

  Alone.

  “As for you—” Salvio whirled on her, and the look in his eyes made her heart stop.

  Lauren was usually assertive, and could hold her own in most situations. Well, situations that didn’t involve her mother or Crocker, both of whom were experts at getting her to bow to their wishes. But this was different. Salvio was more than angry. He was enraged, unstable. Dangerous. She’d never seen him like this. She’d never seen anyone like this.

  Instinctively, she backed up.

  “Like I said—” Jack moved with her, and the hairs on the back of her neck prickled “—get your ass back to camp, and don’t poke your nose into things that aren’t your business.”

  “Uh…okay. Sure. I’m…out of here.” Her feet were like weights, her boots glued to the floor.

  But the ten minutes it had taken her to negotiate the distance out to the warehouse was quartered on her trip back. Speed records had been set with longer times.

  Chapter 9

  J ust after midnight the well reached target depth.

  Lauren worked straight through until noon the next day, analyzing samples. All through the target section the rock she saw was the same. Fractured limestone, littered with invertebrate fossils—exactly as expected. What she’d not expected was that she’d be writing these words on her final geologist’s report for the Caribou Island well…

  Hydrocarbons: none.

  The well was a dry hole. Not even a hint of oil. Lauren tossed her mechanical pencil onto the counter and rubbed her tired eyes. For the first time since she’d arrived on the island, she was glad communications were down. The worst part of her job was delivering bad news.

  Bill Walters, Tiger’s VPs, their CEO…all of them would be disappointed. But it came with the territory. This was the business they were in. That’s why it was called oil exploration. If it was a sure thing, everyone would be doing it. The odds of discovering a new, untapped oil field in the Arctic were about a hundred to one. Good odds, really, in the scheme of things.

  Lauren flipped off her microscope and worked to shake off her own disappointment. At least they had the samples, the data. Her team would be able to finish their geologic maps of the area, giving Tiger an edge when bidding on future land leases on which to continue their search for oil.

  It was something. Not the best outcome, maybe, but one she and every other oil company geologist in the world was used to. That was the job.

  Deal with it, and move on. That’s what Crocker would say. He wouldn’t waste a second brooding. An hour after Lauren’s report hit the office, Crocker would have already calculated how much of the loss Tiger could write off in this year’s taxes.

  Money. That’s what it was all about. Not the geology or Alaska or any of the reasons she, herself, was drawn to the Arctic. It was all about the money.

  “Deal with it, Lauren. Move on.”

  She smiled bitterly, bagged the last of the samples from Caribou Island 1, tossed them into the open crate on the floor, and grabbed her hard hat on her way out the door.

  “That’s it then,” Salvio said, when she dropped her report into his in-box fifteen minutes later. “Dry hole.”

  “As a bone.” Lauren wanted to collapse on the Naugahyde sofa in Salvio’s office—something she would have done under normal circumstances so they could commiserate about the outcome of the well. But she was convinced, especially after that scene in the warehouse yesterday, that the circumstances were not normal, and so she forced herself to stand.

  “Plug and abandon,” Salvio said matter-of-factly as he scribbled notes on his own report.

  She watched him, remembering his warning of the day before—and her fear, which had been so palpable she could almost smell it, even now.

  Seth had come to her trailer last night before his shift began, but Lauren switched the lights off and didn’t answer when he knocked. She’d known it was him because she peeked out the window of the lab and saw him standing there in the wind and blowing snow.

  She’d feared he would pick the lock again, and thanked God when he didn’t and had headed back to camp. The incident with Salvio had been so unnerving, she knew if Seth were to see her in the state she was in, his first instinct would have been to take her in his arms.

  And that would have been the end of all her good intentions. She’d never have been able to tell him that it was over between them. That it had never started. That she was getting married, and that her career came—

  “Hey.”

  The warm timbre of his voice snapped her back to the moment. She and Salvio looked up at the same time. Her stomach did that little jittery thing it always did when she saw him.

  “Adams,” Salvio said. “What’s the word?”

  “Hole’s cleaned out. We’re done.”

  They�
�d finished drilling, and were ready to begin the operation’s shutdown, which would take a few more weeks to complete. Longer, if the weather didn’t cooperate. But Lauren wasn’t thinking about that, as she watched Seth hand Salvio a ream of paperwork edged with greasy fingerprints.

  As Salvio studied it, Seth’s gaze found hers.

  She thought about the other night when he’d eased her onto the countertop in the lab, pressing his hard body between her spread legs. She couldn’t help herself.

  He was remembering, too. She read it in the way he drank her in, the way he absently wiped a streak of drilling mud from his cheek, letting his forefinger trace a slow path across his lower lip, just as her tongue had.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Wh-what?” Lauren snapped to attention.

  Salvio stared hard at her, at them both, with steely eyes. “Sorry to break up the little moment you were having with Nanook, here, but—”

  “The name’s Adams.” Seth took a step toward him, and for a frightening second Lauren thought Salvio would come off the chair. She would never forget the wild look in his eyes yesterday in the warehouse as he gripped that crowbar.

  “Whatever.” Salvio dismissed Seth with a look and turned his attention back to her. “As soon as this frickin’ weather clears—”

  “I know. I’m on the next chopper out.” She nodded at her final geologist’s report positioned facedown in his in-box. “When the uplink’s back online—”

  “Yeah, yeah. It’ll get sent.” Salvio waved her away.

  His flippant attitude annoyed her. Geologist’s reports were confidential. Even if Caribou Island was a dry hole, the data was still important. Salvio treated it, and her, far too casually.

  “So…that’s that, then.” Seth trapped her gaze, but the moment, as Salvio had called it, was lost.

  She remembered why she was here, what Tiger expected of her, what Crocker would expect.

  “That’s that,” she said, and pushed past him into the hall.

  Seth stood in the doorway of Salvio’s office and watched Lauren march stiffly down the hall toward the mudroom. One minute she’d looked at him with enough heat to melt a polar ice cap, and in the next her brown eyes had frosted to a subzero glare.

  She wanted him, but she didn’t want to want him. He knew the feeling. Boy, did he ever.

  “Snap out of it,” Salvio said.

  Seth turned his attention back to the company man. Salvio’s face was hard, his eyes cool steel. “Stay away from her.”

  “That an order?”

  “Yeah.”

  Seth bit down on his tongue so he wouldn’t say something stupid.

  Salvio grabbed at the keys dangling from his belt, secured by one of those retractable chains, and opened the locked drawer of his desk.

  Seth just stood there.

  “Something you want? Or are you just trying to piss me off by wasting my time?” Salvio snatched Lauren’s report from his in-box and scanned it, one hand resting in the open drawer.

  Seth’s gaze was drawn to the pile of papers strewn in a careless pile inside. Staring back at him were the company man’s daily drilling reports, along with copies of Lauren’s daily geologist reports.

  On an exploration well like this one, daily reports were sent via a secured, encrypted fax line over the satellite uplink. E-mail was used, too, but mostly for routine communications, not to transmit status reports or data. It was too risky, too easy for hackers hired by competing oil companies to intercept.

  Salvio flipped to the second page of Lauren’s report and kept reading, while Seth’s gaze slid casually over the stack of older reports in the drawer. He did a double take, then frowned. Each report had an extra slip of paper stapled to it.

  They were fax confirmations!

  Those reports had been transmitted. He moved an inch closer, tilting his head to read better. He saw yesterday’s date on one, the previous day’s date printed on another, and the day before that on—

  Salvio slammed the drawer shut. Seth was caught off guard by the hard-edged meld of suspicion and fury simmering in Salvio’s eyes.

  “Lookin’ for something?”

  Seth shrugged. “Just wanted to let you know we were finished up there.” He nodded out the window toward the rig.

  “So you said.” Salvio locked the drawer, then let his key chain snap back into place on his belt.

  Seth eyed the dozen or so keys attached to the chain, remembering what Lauren had said about the company man being the only other person on site who had access to her trailer. Salvio’s gaze followed his, and his trademark scowl deepened.

  Seth turned to leave, but Salvio called him back.

  “Where you from, Adams?”

  Seth’s mind raced over everything he’d seen and heard in the last week, and what those fax transmissions implied, given the fact that the satellite uplink had been rigged to go from fully functioning to nonoperational with the flip of a switch.

  He forced himself to slump casually against the door frame, and said, “Kachelik.”

  “Village boy, eh?”

  “Yeah. What of it?”

  Salvio snorted. “You don’t seem the type, is all.”

  “What type is that?”

  “You know.”

  Yeah, he knew all right. Salvio was eyeing him like he was the Alaskan equivalent of what some of these old boys from the South called “white trash.”

  Seth didn’t say a word. In his mind he was piecing together the puzzle, getting a picture that looked more and more like Jack Salvio. Seth liked him, or one of his cronies, for O’Connor’s murder. But Salvio couldn’t be in this corporate piracy scheme alone. There had to be someone else pulling the strings.

  One short week ago he’d been sure it was Lauren—if not the key player, then at least involved in some way. But now he was just as sure it wasn’t her. He swore silently, cursing himself. Either Lauren was innocent, or he was letting his personal feelings for her corrupt his objectivity to the point he couldn’t see straight.

  What he really suspected was that both of those statements were true.

  A lot was riding on this case, on fingering the perps before they even knew they were under investigation. All of them, right up the tree to the top. He couldn’t blow it now. If he wanted his Bureau job back—and he was beginning to think he did—he needed this win.

  “No,” Salvio said, eyeing him with a measure of suspicion that made Seth wonder if he’d been made. “You don’t seem the type at all.”

  Late that night, Lauren reached into the economy-size box of tampons in her bathroom and fished out the last surviving rock sample from the crate that had been destroyed.

  She couldn’t bring herself to look at it yesterday or the day before. She’d been afraid of what she’d find. Of what it meant, given all she’d seen and heard, given everything that had happened.

  She was still afraid, but she had to know.

  Caribou Island 1 was a dry hole. Shale and limestone, a few interesting fossils, nothing more. She’d taken only a quick glance at the strange sample that first day when she found the unlabeled crate in front of her trailer.

  It was time to take more than a glance. It was time to find out the truth.

  Selecting the largest chunk of rock from the plastic bag, Lauren wiped the gray drilling mud from it with absorbent cotton, then placed it on the stage of her microscope. It was a fine-grained sandstone, crumbly to the touch, a rich chestnut that reminded her of the color of Seth’s eyes.

  Absently, a smile edged her lips.

  She studied the sample a long time, far longer than she had done with any sample in recent memory. Finally, plucking the chunk of rock from the stage, she touched it to her nose and closed her eyes.

  A deep breath later she was sure.

  Chapter 10

  H e couldn’t sleep.

  Seth rolled onto his back in the narrow bunk in the room he shared with three other guys. The damp, twisted sheet rolled with him. He swore
, ripped it away from his sweat-soaked body, and swiveled out of bed.

  Two of his “roommates” were on shift. The other one snored loudly in the bunk across from his, oblivious to Seth’s insomnia. It was hot as hell in the room.

  He checked the luminous dial on his watch. Three o’clock. In the afternoon, he reminded himself. He’d only slept a couple of hours. Pulling the blackout drape away from the window, he blinked against the harsh yard lights reflecting off the blowing snow of the blizzard still raging outside.

  He’d never seen a whiteout last this long. Six days. Bledsoe was probably fit to be tied. Seth hadn’t been able to contact him since the day Lauren arrived on the island and the weather turned bad—and since one of Jack Salvio’s cronies had made sure the sat-link was only operational when Salvio wanted to send a transmission or make a call.

  That’s exactly what was happening. Salvio was faxing in his morning reports, and Lauren’s, too, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening out here. Seth wondered how Salvio had fixed it so Lauren didn’t have to make contact with any of her superiors by phone.

  From what Lauren had told him about Bill Walters, Seth got the impression they were used to daily phone contact on an operation like this one. Maybe Walters was in on the scam with Salvio. It was possible.

  Before his talk with Lauren the other night, Seth was leaning toward pegging Walters for the business end of this corporate piracy deal. As exploration manager for Tiger’s Alaskan holdings, Walters was definitely in a position to make the kinds of contacts required to pull something like this off. The fact that Tiger’s CEO was thinking about promoting Lauren over Walters, provided a motive. Revenge. Not to mention the money involved. But after he’d heard Lauren’s take on the family man’s character and goals, it didn’t make sense that Walters was the ringleader.

  Seth grabbed some clean clothes out of the duffel bag stowed under his bunk and dressed in the dark. On his way out to Lauren’s trailer he asked himself for the hundredth time that week what the hell he was doing.

  She’s getting married, you idiot.