“Why would Flint do it? This kind of destruction”—Helena motioned toward the screens—“can’t serve their interests. Besides that, it’s criminal. And if they transcend national borders…” She left the sentence unfinished.
“You’re right, Ms. President. It doesn’t make sense. They own or control a lot of the Central Valley. Their headquarters are in Connecticut. And there are reports that Croyden Flint and his family flew to Park City late this week for spring break and there’s a weird spring storm brewing there. That’s why we want to talk to Gianni Barone.”
“Couldn’t these just be unfortunate coincidences?” Helena asked after a moment.
“My staff and some other atmospheric agencies checked out the build-up to the storms. Weather is an inherently chaotic system and, therefore, vulnerable to an infinite number of variables that can effect changes with no warning, but these storms were all highly atypical. And our monitoring equipment picked up irregular and very powerful electromagnetic pulses coming from TESLA prior to each incident.”
Helena’s eyes trailed back to the large video monitors lining the walls. The devastation was almost incomprehensible. That it might have been deliberate made her mind reel. “Do I understand that you think these storms were somehow instigated by Flint’s equipment in Antarctica?” Helena asked carefully.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“But they’ve destroyed Flint holdings.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Helena looked at her deeply for a moment, not saying anything. This is like The Twilight Zone, only weirder.
“So are we talking about big mistakes or are we talking about eco-terrorism?”
“Eco-terrorism,” Candy said with no hesitation. “A man named Greg Simpson has been running the TESLA installation since its inception. He used to run a program at HAARP and has been on intelligence radar screens for years. He’s meticulous, bright, and very, very driven. He’s a JASON,” Candy explained, mentioning the little-known, elite group of hand-picked scientists who consult for the government on everything from nuclear weaponry to … whatever the government wants them to investigate. “A few years back, Flint offered him a blank check and full control of the TESLA project. He walked away from HAARP without a backward glance. Bottom line, ma’am: he’s got more than just brains in his head, he’s got a lot of classified information in there, too, bundled up with a lot of ego and attitude.”
“Meaning what?”
“He could be susceptible to compromise or temptation.”
“Is he stable?”
“No.”
“Dangerous?”
“Could be. There’s a lot of firepower down there.”
Helena tried to keep her mind off the anger pulsing in her blood. “You said that the Pentagon has made use of the equipment down there. What for?”
“Thank you for asking, ma’am. Let me introduce you to someone who may have an answer to that.” Candy picked up one of the remotes on the table in front of her and pointed it at the only dark monitor in the room. The screen lit up with the larger-than-life-size image of an impassive face of a graying, crew-cutted man with one star on the collar of his Navy uniform.
“President Hernandez, I’d like to present Vice-Admiral Deekins, acting director of the Office of Ionospheric Monitoring. Admiral, your commander in chief,” Candy said, drawing out the last words.
The man rose to his feet and saluted. “Good morning, ma’am.”
“Good morning. Be seated, Admiral Deekins, and please accept my condolences on the death of your colleague.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Helena murmured, “Ms. Freeman, please continue.”
“Admiral, we were discussing the storms that trashed Connecticut and California recently. They’re something of a sensation on the weather wonk websites. What can you contribute to the discussion? Has your group found any atmospheric anomalies linked to them?”
“No, ma’am.”
Helena felt a flicker of annoyance at the terse, confident reply and glanced at Candy’s face, which was unchanged.
Either she’s really good, or she’s setting him up. Or both.
Helena returned her gaze to the screen.
“Nothing, admiral?” Candy asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“Are you familiar with Flint AgroChemical’s TESLA facility, admiral? In Antarctica.”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Could you explain to us what it does?”
“It’s a private concern operating within another nation’s sovereign territory. I believe they conduct atmospheric research. I don’t have any more specific knowledge than that.”
“Admiral Medev was speaking with a Flint executive when he died. Why? Does your office work with Flint?” Candy snapped, her tone as sharp as the shard from a broken bottle.
The admiral’s cold eyes and clenched jaw betrayed his irritation. He was clearly not used to being addressed in such a way. “To the best of my recollection, this office does not. Perhaps they were friends.”
Candy opened a file on the table in front of her, then leaned back in her chair, one slim, braceletted arm resting easily on the table. “Could be. Admiral Medev and Mr. Barone worked at HAARP for a few overlapping years. As did the man who designed and runs TESLA, Dr. Greg Simpson. Please tell the president what HAARP is and does, admiral.”
“Ms. President, HAARP is a large dipole antenna array in rural Alaska that utilizes the ionosphere as a conduit for transmitting military communications.”
“Is that all, admiral?” Candy asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“I could be more technical, but if you’re not intimately familiar with what riometers and digisondes do and how fluxgate and induction magnetometers work, there’s no point in that. If you want me to validate all the nonsense about HAARP that’s on the Internet, I can’t do that.”
“Is TESLA just HAARP 2.0?”
“I can’t say, Ms. Freeman. You’d have to ask someone at Flint.”
“Thank you, admiral.” With a click from the remote, the screen went dark. Candy turned to Helena. “Ms. President, I assure you that HAARP is more than a glorified radio station.”
She beckoned to a man who’d been sitting quietly at the edge of the room, out of the line of sight from the computer-mounted camera she’d just shut off. He stood up and saluted.
“Ms. President, I’d like to introduce Admiral Teke Curtis. He was with the Office of Ionospheric Monitoring and recently began working for the Secretary of the Navy. He also worked at HAARP while Greg Simpson was there. Gianni Barone was Admiral Curtis’s direct report.”
The president nodded at the officer, who completed his salute with a sharp snap of his wrist. “Please join us at the table, admiral. What is your take on this situation?”
The man stepped forward and took a seat several places away from Candy.
“I agree with Ms. Freeman, ma’am. The Internet is full of outlandish rumors about HAARP, but some contain shreds of truth. The HAARP array does transmit massive amounts of energy into the atmosphere, primarily the ionosphere. Fully ramped up, it could knock satellites out of orbit and planes out of the sky and disrupt communications worldwide. It could make people crazy on a big scale. We don’t do any of those things, but the capability is there.” He paused minutely. “TESLA is different. It has numerous arrays that transmit at a wide variety of frequencies. Its capabilities are far greater than HAARP’s. Our intelligence indicates that TESLA is capable of causing wide-scale atmospheric events with significant terrestrial consequences on a global scale.”
Without looking away or letting her expression change, Helena let the officer’s words sink into her brain for a moment before replying. “Do you think TESLA has been compromised?”
Admiral Curtis was silent for a long moment. “I do, ma’am.”
“By whom?”
“That’s hard to say. Our surveillance satellites haven’t recorded any unusual occurrences. A plane landed the
re approximately twenty-four hours ago and departed an hour later. There has been a sharp uptick in electromagnetic activity since then. Very strong activity.”
“Could any of that recent activity have caused the storms we’re discussing?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Ms. President, would it be possible for the three of us to have a private conversation?” Candy asked smoothly.
“Certainly.”
Helena stood up and so did everyone in the room. She walked toward an unobtrusive door near her chair. An aide materialized to open it and Helena, Candy Freeman, and the admiral walked into a small, informal sitting area. Helena ignored the seats, turning to face Candy and Admiral Curtis the moment the door was closed.
“Teke, please describe what you discovered about the relationship between Admiral Medev and Flint,” Candy said, her voice warmer than it had been in the larger room.
Teke Curtis looked at Helena, his dark eyes grave. “The office had a long-standing relationship with Flint, Ms. President. The program was highly classified and for a long time things were handled personally between Croyden Flint and Admiral Bonner, now Secretary of Defense Bonner.”
Helena felt her irritation level rise at the mention of her Cabinet secretary’s name.
“The results were very effective but deliberately low-key, ma’am. When Admiral Bonner retired, Admiral Medev became responsible for liaising with Flint, and Croyden Flint installed Gianni Barone on the Flint side. Barone took a tougher stance on our requests than Croyden Flint ever did, possibly because he and Medev never got along, not even back in their days at HAARP. It appears that, in response, Medev began dealing directly with Greg Simpson. Covertly.”
Mother of God. Helena was silent for a moment, looking at her hands as his words sunk in.
“Where did Medev’s requests originate?”
“Some came from higher offices, ma’am. But some appear to have no official origin.”
“So he may have been acting alone?”
The admiral nodded.
“Have there been incidents … orchestrated by him since I took office?”
“We’ve confirmed one. The floods in Afghanistan in late winter.”
It wasn’t easy for Helena to keep her cool in the face of his admission. “You know this for a fact?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Treason is such an ugly word. “Anything else, Admiral Curtis?” Helena asked, eager to get out of the room and into planning mode. She had a Cabinet to clean out.
“Yes, ma’am. Gianni Barone was in Malta during a recent NATO conference, and met with a scientist named Tess Beauchamp. She’s a weather researcher who also used to work at HAARP. Immediately after the conference, she left her job in France and returned stateside. According to the state department, she flew to South Africa about a week ago and left there for Antarctica on a Flint plane late Thursday. We believe it was her plane that landed at TESLA yesterday.”
“Why is that significant?”
“We believe she replaced Simpson,” Candy said. “The same plane took off about an hour later to return to Capetown and we have an unconfirmed report that Simpson was on it.” She paused and looked directly at the president. “We think TESLA has gone rogue, Ms. President. Either Greg Simpson is still running the show remotely or Tess Beauchamp is working with him.”
“What makes you think he’s ‘gone rogue,’ Candy?”
Teke Curtis cleared his throat. “If I may, Ms. President. Greg Simpson is a classic narcissist. He thinks he’s infallible. When he runs a project, he goes through staff like water through a sieve until he has a team that follows him blindly. I’ve seen how he operates.”
Candy leaned forward. “Greg Simpson is like Dr. Evil without the laugh track. He’s buttoned down, smart, OCD, sociopathic—and mightily pissed off, ma’am. Mightily pissed off.”
“Let’s bring in the others on this conversation,” Helena said coolly, and walked back toward the door.
CHAPTER 25
Park City residents and guests alike were awakened before dawn on Saturday by the flash of lightning and the crash of thunder—and the sound of hard, vicious rain beating against the slate roofs and redwood siding of the town’s multi-million-dollar structures. Incredulous faces stared through windows, watching the powder they’d skied on the day before turn into slush and then into puddles. Streams rushed along the sides of the roads.
The combination of rain and warmth began to drill holes in the snowpack throughout the mountainsides that surrounded the village. Layers of months-old snow, some coarse and some fine, some dry and some wetter, absorbed or gave way or deflected the rainwater. The water moved through the hardened pack; in some places it slid over impermeable ice lenses and in others found narrow pathways through which it percolated to the base.
Hours of this wet barrage fomented a result that was cataclysmic, though not immediately visible. Huge sections of the mountain’s snowfield went isothermal: enough water had penetrated to the base of the snowpack so that the layers upon layers of dense, compacted snow now rested atop a thin film of meltwater. Encouraged by wind and gravity, the season’s solid mass of many feet of snow began to lurch, then slip, then glide down the sides of the hills.
By noon in Park City, the road to the airport was crammed bumper to bull bars with mud-spattered shuttle buses, sports cars, and luxury sport vehicles bearing irritated, petulant vacationers. Every car sported rooftop carriers full of now-pointless skis. The thwarted travelers sat in the stalled traffic and telephoned, texted, and Tweeted their frustration, but their actions did nothing to speed their departure. They remained, oblivious, in harm’s way.
The avalanche descended on the town without warning. Thunder from the storm masked its roar; the rain- and warmth-spawned fog conspired to hide the rushing gray wall of wet, heavy death as it slid into and over the town at hundreds of miles per hour. Timbers cracked and walls crashed onto people sitting indoors in front of blazing fires or glowing screens, onto families lingering over lunch or partiers recovering from the night before. Screams were smothered by the choking weight of the gushing slush. Buildings collapsed, their stones and snapped beams and shattered roofs tumbling and bouncing in the streets’ filthy torrents. Cars were thrown, buried, or crushed; the luckier occupants died instantly.
In less than half an hour, the catastrophe was complete. The storm front had moved on, its fierce power spent. The sun came out. The tiny, once-wealthy town had been completely destroyed, and lay buried now under many feet of heavy snow and grisly debris. The playground of millionaires had been transformed into a deep, sucking sea of mud and carnage. All was silent except for the rhythmic thudding of news helicopters and the distant wails of approaching emergency vehicles.
Croyden Flint lay pinned in the back of the stretch Hummer he’d hired to take his family to the airport. His daughters, their husbands, and his grandchildren lay around him, some screaming, some moaning, some ominously silent. The stench of death was in the air, mingling with the metallic smell of blood and the must of wet wool.
The limo was on its side, tipped nearly upside down. The temperature inside the cabin was dropping. Filthy, slushy water flowed steadily through the gaping hole where the windshield had been. The water cascaded over the upended steering console and flowed around the heads and shoulders of broken bodies that lay on what had moments before been the interior roof of the car. Croyden watched helplessly as his family drowned around him, as their bodies thrashed and then grew still. He was next.
Wedged in the twisted wreckage, unable to move, Croyden Flint could only close his eyes in horror as he felt the icy water wend its wet fingers through his hair and drive its slow needle-pricks of cold into his scalp, his forehead, his eye sockets, and, finally, his nostrils.
CHAPTER 26
Greg relaxed in the plush seat of the Gulfstream jet, ignoring his unwelcome entourage of Flint flunkies while flipping through the latest issue of Greenwich magazine. Its slick, glossy photos of sli
ck, glossy people made him want to laugh. He’d rocked their cloistered world; he’d given those smugly smiling people, who lived pointless lives in ostentatious houses, a wake-up call. And it had been nothing more than a by-product of his interest in Croyden Flint. Croyden’s homes had all been targets: the mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut; the huge clifftop estate in Mexico; the getaway “cabin” in Park City; and the big house in California’s Central Valley. He’d known Croyden Flint would be at one of them during this northern spring weekend. And if he hadn’t been, if he was still alive, then he’d be around to watch the rest of his empire crumble. Literally.
This widespread destruction was Greg’s magnum opus. Flint, the Pentagon, even other governments probably already knew that he was behind the destruction and were scrambling to figure out what would happen next and how to prevent it.
They can try all they like. It won’t do any good.
Greg smiled, stretching his cramped muscles as he leaned back in his chair. The next event would be unparalleled if it happened as it was supposed to. Given his previous success, Greg had no reason to consider that it might miss its mark. But then, the target was so much larger this time—not some rural hick town, small ski resort, or suburban retreat. His next creation would affect an entire region, an area that bridged two continents and spanned innumerable warring histories. And the nation that would bear the brunt of it had a troubled past and a manic present; thanks to Greg, soon—very soon—Israel would face a devastated future.
The timing would be perfect. The storm would flatten one of Flint’s most prized projects and some of its most productive agricultural lands and would coincide with a visit by America’s new defense secretary—and Croyden Flint’s lapdog—Frederick Bonner.
Dry Ice Page 25
