“I’m kind of surprised you’re in such a rush to get off my ship while everyone else seems so desperate to get on,” the captain queried with playful, barely disguised suspicion.
Gracie glanced at Finch; then, without trying too hard to throw their host off the trail, she grinned and told him, “That’s what makes us the best damn investigative reporting team in the business. Always one step ahead of the story.”
As if to rescue her from the uncomfortable moment, the harness appeared again, and a crewmember helped Gracie strap herself into it. Once she was safely locked in, he waved to the winch operator in the chopper, and the slack in the cable began to tighten up.
“Thanks again, for everything,” she yelled to the captain, emphasizing the last word in reference to Finch’s request that he keep their departure under wraps. He’d graciously agreed, without asking questions, and she felt a slight pang of guilt at not being able to share the whole story behind their hasty exit with him.
He flicked her a small parting wave. “It’s been our pleasure. Just let us know what you find out there,” he added with a telling wink. “We’ll be watching.”
Before she could react, the cable went taut, yanking her into the ice-speckled air. She breathlessly watched the ship recede beneath her, dreading the marathon journey ahead and the uncertain reward awaiting her at its end.
Chapter 22
West Antarctic Ice Sheet
The four ghosts on the ice shelf stayed low and watched as the Royal Navy chopper glided over the ship, just under half a mile west of their position.
They weren’t worried about being spotted. Their gear would more than take care of that. They just lay there, hugging the packed snow, invisible in their full “snow white” camouflage parkas and pants, faces hidden behind white balaclavas, eyes and mouths peeking out from unsettling round openings. Even the soles of their boots, which they scrubbed down every morning before heading into action, were white. Four snowmobiles, also white and without markings, squatted nearby. Hidden under white camouflage netting, they were also virtually undetectable from the sky.
The team leader monitored the chopper through his high-powered binoculars as it lifted the last of the news crew off the ship. A hint of a smile of satisfaction flitted across his chapped lips. Things were going as planned. Which wasn’t a given, considering how tight the timing had been and how frantic the deployment of his unit had been.
The operation had gone live four days earlier. They’d left their training camp in North Carolina and flown to Christchurch in New Zealand, where an Air National Guard C-17 Globemaster had been waiting on the tarmac to whisk them down to the National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Station, on the ice continent’s Ross Island. From there, an LC-130 Hercules aircraft fitted with skis had ferried them to an isolated staging area on the ice shelf itself, fifteen miles south of their current position. Snowmobiles that they’d flown in with them had carried them on the last leg of their thirteen-thousand-mile journey.
The extreme change of climate and the travel through multiple time zones were brutal and would have debilitated most people, but it didn’t affect them. They’d trained extensively for this operation and knew what to expect.
To say the job was a high-value, priority-one assignment was underselling it, big-time. He’d never experienced anything quite as intense, nor as uncompromising, as the rigorous interview process and psychological profiling he’d undergone before getting the job. Once that was settled, no expense had been spared in either the training facilities or the gear that was made available to him and his team. The client clearly didn’t have budget issues. Then again, a lot of the firm’s clients were governments—the U.S. government being its biggest—and they could usually afford what the job requirements would dictate.
In this case, however, it was clear to the team leader that the stakes were higher than on any of his previous assignments. Beirut, Bosnia, Afghanistan, then Iraq—he now saw those frenzied, violent years as mere stepping-stones. They’d led him here, to being selected to lead this unit.
It was, without a doubt, the gig of a lifetime.
And now, after all the preparation and after an interminable wait, it was finally under way. He’d started to think it would never happen. After completing their training, he and the rest of the small team of “contractors”—the spin-speak name always made him smirk, but he was more than happy