Hard Line - Pamela Clare Page 0,2

the ceiling, a tube protruding from her mouth.

Kristi Chang, the station RN, stood beside her, tears streaming down her cheeks as she removed an IV from Patty’s arm. “I’m sorry. We did everything we could.”

Lance coughed as if choking back tears, took Patty’s lifeless hand. “Patty.”

Samantha stood, took a step toward the bed. “If I had found her earlier… If I had gone to check on her the moment she was late for breakfast…”

Lance rubbed his thumb over the back of Patty’s hand. “I should’ve been there.”

Decker put a hand on Lance’s shoulder, looked over at Samantha. “Don’t do this to yourselves—either of you. This isn’t your fault. She must have had some hidden condition, some undiagnosed pulmonary or cardiac problem. Until there’s an autopsy, we won’t know for sure what killed her.”

Lance stroked Patty’s cheek. “You’re doing an autopsy?”

“Me?” Decker shook his head. “No. That won’t happen until we get her body back to the US in November.”

Lance wiped tears from his face. “That’s seven months from now.”

There were no flights in or out of the station during austral winter. The risk of a plane’s fuel freezing was too high.

Decker nodded. “We have no choice but to bag her body and keep it on ice.”

“Oh, God.” Samantha’s heart constricted at the thought of Patty spending seven months, frozen solid, in a body bag in the subzero service arches below the station.

Steve Hardin, the winter site manager, walked in. “I heard that Patty… Oh, no! Son of a bitch! What the hell happened?”

But Samantha needed to get out of here.

She hurried past Steve and stepped into the hallway, where the others had begun to gather, worry on their faces.

Kazem Hamidi, a friend who worked with the BICEP2 telescope, was the first to speak. “Is Patty okay?”

Samantha pushed the words past the lump in her throat. “She’s … dead.”

“I’m so sorry.” Ryan McClain, one of the firefighters and an EMT, rested a hand on Samantha’s shoulder. “How? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“First, the satellite crash, and now this.” Bai Zhang Wei, who studied neutrinos, raised his hands to his face in disbelief. “What is going on?”

“How can she be dead?” Charli Ortega, the coms manager, had tears in her eyes. “I didn’t see this in the cards during her last Tarot reading.”

Jason Huger, the breakfast cook, held up his smartphone. “How did she die?”

Shock and grief became rage.

Samantha knocked the phone out of his hand. “You’re not putting this online, Jason. Patty didn’t die to amuse your YouTube audience.”

“Hey!” He bent down, reached for his phone.

But Ryan was faster. He picked it up, deleted the footage, and handed the phone back to Jason. “Show some respect, man, or I’ll put your phone through the shredder.”

“What happened?” Charli asked.

Samantha swallowed. “When Patty didn’t show up this morning, I went to her room. She was unresponsive. I couldn’t even tell she was breathing. Decker and Kristi tried to save her, but… I’m sorry. I can’t.”

Samantha turned and ran down the hallway toward her room, locking the door behind her. She sank onto her bed and sobbed.

Cobra’s private jet was somewhere over the Pacific, headed toward a refueling stop in Hawaii before Tower called Thor, Malik Jones, and Lev Segal into the conference room for a briefing.

“Sorry to keep you waiting and in the dark, but we’re caught in a developing situation.” He motioned toward the chairs. “Take a seat.”

Thor sat, exchanged glances with Jones and Segal, the three of them eager to find out what was so important that the US government would risk sending them to Antarctica in the middle of austral winter.

Tower tapped at his pad, and a map of Antarctica appeared on the large monitor on the wall. “Eighteen hours ago, a new US military satellite with a state-of-the-art missile-control system crashed about three hundred fifty miles from Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole. It wasn’t a mechanical failure. The satellite was hacked.”

Thor gaped at him. “Hacked? Fuck.”

“Holy shit.”

“Who could do something like that?”

“We’ll get to that in a moment.” Tower tapped his pad, and a schematic of the satellite appeared on the screen. “Are any of you familiar with Golden Horde? No? I’m not surprised. It’s the nickname given to a new guidance system that enables missiles to adjust course and coordinate with one another after launch. In the past, once a missile was in the air, it simply followed its trajectory until impact, like a cannonball. With Golden Horde, a sophisticated GPS and communication between missiles enable the weapons to